


Morai's Call To Hope

by Terapsina



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Ahsoka Tano Needs a Hug, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Anakin Skywalker Doesn't Turn to the Dark Side, Anakin Skywalker Needs a Hug, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, BAMF Ahsoka Tano, CT-7567 | Rex is a Good Bro, Captain Rex Does Not Get Paid Enough, Episode: s02e21-22 Twilight of the Apprentice, Episode: s04e13 A World Between Worlds, Episode: s07e09 Old Friends Not Forgotten, Fix-It, Gen, Human Disaster Anakin Skywalker, Master & Padawan Relationship(s), Minor Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Ahsoka Tano, POV Anakin Skywalker, POV CT-7567 | Rex, Present Tense, Saving the galaxy, That's Not How The Force Works, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, Time Traveling Anakin Skywalker
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:53:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 22,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24667171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Terapsina/pseuds/Terapsina
Summary: Moments after Anakin walks away from Ahsoka and so takes the first of his last steps down the path that would lead him beyond saving, he hears the cooing hoot of a convor and feels talons piercing into his shoulder.Next thing he knows he's in a desert of dark sand following ghostly voices that lead him to the sight of an older version of his former Padawan confronting a figure cloaked in black.Maybe he was brought there just to observe but when he sees Ahsoka under threat he does what he's always done when someone he loves is in danger, he charges ahead and deals with the consequences later.ORInstead of future Ezra it is an Anakin days before his fall who sees Ahsoka's fight with Vader. And instead of pulling Ahsoka inside with him he crosses the border of the portal to join her in confronting something that will turn out to be his worst nightmare.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, CT-7567 | Rex & Ahsoka Tano, CT-7567 | Rex & Anakin Skywalker, CT-7567 | Rex & Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 336
Kudos: 760





	1. The Desert Between Worlds

**Author's Note:**

> I'm writing this story for exactly four reasons: 1) To save as many people as I can; 2) To knock some sense into Anakin; 3) To ruin Palpatine's life; and 4) To get Snips and Skyguy to finally hug.

“Master Kenobi always said there’s no such thing as luck,” Ahsoka says with a grin that makes Anakin momentarily feel like no time has passed at all since she left the Jedi. And the months since then have been nothing but a bad dream.

The feeling doesn’t last. His worry over the Chancellor landing back on his shoulders and the exhaustion that’s been steadily filling him up for years now drowning out the brief amusement Ahsoka sparked. Still, he doesn’t want to take it out on her so he summons up some vestige of their old banter.

“Good thing I taught you otherwise,” he says as he once would have but when he tentatively reaches out feels only the softly glowing embers of their Force bond where once was a steady stream of warmth, she’s still holding herself back. It hurts, this distance between him and his former Padawan. But he doesn’t know how to bridge it so he turns around to leave and join Obi-Wan in preparation for their mission against Grievous.

“Anakin!” Ahsoka calls out from behind him and when he turns finds her staring at him a little uncertainly but with open care. “Good luck.”

Anakin’s lips twist up weakly and with a final look at his little Snips, though not so little anymore, he leaves.

As the doors slide shut between them he stops and lets out a shaky breath, taking a moment to fortify himself against the urge to turn back and rush to Ahsoka to beg her to come back. He’s missed her, missed their constant back and forth, missed their little games over who had taken out the most droids or pulled off the more impressive crash landing, without Ahsoka around the never-ending war against the Separatists has somehow gotten even harder to bear. Especially when he sees Padmé so rarely now and even that almost exclusively only through holocomms, or even when they manage to be on the same planet there is never enough time away from the war to spend time just with each other. And with his relationship with Obi-Wan so strained lately it feels like the only friend he has anymore is the Chancellor.

He wishes he and Ahsoka had time for that talk she seemed to be promising for after she’s helped Bo-Katan and hopefully captured Maul.

The thoughts rush him only a moment but before he can start walking again there is the unexpected sound of wings and the gentle hoot of a bird behind him and before the impossibility of it can fully register, its talons pierce his armor as if it’s not there at all and cut into his shoulder.

There is the sharp feeling of vertigo as reality bends around him and the floor of the Star Destroyer vanishes from under him to be replaced by the black sand of an alien desert. Darkness surrounds him from every direction and the only illumination comes from the strangely bent light reflecting off the two moons above him - one large reddish moon like a threat from above and one distant and small blue one - but even that light is weak and barely helpful.

Not that it matters that much, for there doesn’t seem to be anything for him to look at.

He shakes his head, trying to dispel dizziness.

Right away he senses something wrong. Even more than the change in his physical surroundings he’s overwhelmed by the change in the Force around him. Where before it was the warmth of the Living Force that has always been present wherever he went, the feeling of trillions of lights from every living being across the galaxy flowing around him, there is now a coolness in the Force. It is not the Dark Side, he can tell that much but the light is more distant, like the starlight from suns that are billions of light-years away.

Anakin pushes onto his knees shakily, the coarse black desert sand running between his fingers without sticking to them. He frowns, that’s not right either, even dry sand sticks to your palms when it meets the moisture from human skin. Here it just drops back down as if it’s not quite… real.

“Hello!” Anakin calls out not certain he wants to hear an answer but without anything else to do it’s the first thing that comes to his mind to try.

For a few standard seconds, there is no reply and then there come whispers from all around him. 

_‘It is the name of your true self, you’ve only forgotten.’_ Comes a young male voice from somewhere in the distance. _‘I know there is good in you.’_ It’s the only one he hears over the waves of whispers beside it. 

But before he can even begin to follow it it’s overtaken by a different, more familiar voice from a new direction. _‘You were my brother, Anakin.’_ The voice is so full of agony Anakin’s heart clenches in his chest despite the constant low-grade anger he’s been feeling towards his former master since the Raako Hardeen incident.

_‘Rebellions are built on hope.'_ Comes another unfamiliar voice, this time female. Anakin gets back on his feet, looking around for a direction.

_‘I didn’t betray my Jedi,'_ whispers the voice Anakin immediately identifies as belonging to his second-in-command.

“Rex?” Anakin tries and takes an uncertain step toward where he thinks the voice came from.

There is nothing again, though for a moment he thinks he hears the heavy sound of mechanical breathing pressing on him from all sides and then; _‘You’re reckless, Little One. You never would have made it as Obi-Wan’s Padawan. But you might make it as mine.'_ His own voice comes back and Anakin has to swallow at this reminder of his own failure. But the voice was the slightest bit more clear than the ones before it so he follows it.

_‘When I was out there, alone, all I had was your training. And the lessons you taught me…’_ And it feels like he’s finally following some kind of direction because as he’s rushing forward the next onset of whispers all come from Ahsoka.

_‘I know little guy. I miss him too.’_

_‘Your name is… Chewbacca?’  
_

_‘My older brother taught me.’  
_

_‘The last time I saw him he was rushing off to save the Chancellor.’_ He hears and the voice is so clear that Anakin twists around to correct his direction at once.

_‘Ahsoka!’_ Comes someone’s scream of terror. _‘No!’_

“Ahsoka!?” he calls out panicked and stumbles to a halt as the empty darkness around him is interrupted by the sight of two white desert trees leaning on each other for balance and Ahsoka in the space between them with her back to Anakin. Her form is the slightest bit frayed though, making her look more like a mirage than reality. And yet something in the Force tells him this is the first real thing he’s seen since he landed in this dark, whisper-filled desert.

She looks older. Her lekku reaching almost past her waist.

_‘Perhaps I was wrong.’_ Comes a low mechanical voice from deeper within this Force created mirage, the words accented by the rhythmic hiss of some kind of breathing apparatus.

_‘It wouldn’t be the first time,'_ his Padawan replies and past her shoulder Anakin glimpses an imposing figure cloaked all in black, there’s a red lightsaber in their hand poised and towering over the flinching body of a boy fallen on the ground.

At Ahsoka’s voice, the figure turns.

_‘It was foretold that you would be here, our long-awaited meeting has come at last,’_ the Sith says and something about the tone of it lands uneasily in Anakin’s gut.

_‘I’m glad I gave you something to look forward to.’_ Is Ahsoka’s cutting reply.

_‘We need not be adversaries.’_ The Sith extinguishes the light of his saber. _‘The Emperor will show you mercy if you tell me where the remaining Jedi can be found.’_

_‘There are no Jedi.’_ Ahsoka snaps and Anakin feels it like a direct laser hit to his chest, he senses the attention of the Force shifting toward him, edged and burning with its focus. _‘You and your Inquisitors have seen to that.’_

_‘Perhaps this child will confess what you will not,’_ the Sith taunts and turns back toward the boy he’d been about to kill before Ahsoka had interrupted him.

_‘I was beginning to believe I knew who you were behind that mask. But it’s impossible, my Master could_ never _be as vile as you.’_

It’s as if the ground beneath Anakin’s feet vanishes again and he drops to his knees, horror overtaking him at the implication in Ahsoka’s words.

“No,” he chokes out, “it can’t be.”

But the Force is beginning to spin insistently around him, drawing his attention to the Sith and urging him to look. Even in this world out of time where the Force is almost unrecognizable it is knocking against his shields and screaming its truth.

_‘Anakin Skywalker was weak, I destroyed him,’_ the Sith spits out hatefully and Anakin tries to grasp at the hope it brings him, tries to shake off the recognition igniting within him but it’s too late. He doesn’t want to believe but he _sees_. The Force is almost deafening.

He wants to close his eyes and cover his ears but he’s too afraid to look away, like a child he looks on afraid that as soon as he stops something horrible will happen.

_‘Then I will avenge his death.’  
_

_‘Revenge is not the Jedi way,'_ the Sith - not Anakin, it’s not _him_ \- says in a way that makes Anakin unable to tell if it’s meant to be mocking or bitter.

_‘I am no Jedi.’_ Ahsoka ignites her twin lightsabers, both glowing pure white and attacks.

Her form is perfect, her attacks are lightning quick and her evasions twice as much so, she’s almost dancing with her every move. It is a brutal dance but almost beautiful. And some part of Anakin’s mind notes it proudly but the rest of him just stays kneeling and watches almost unseeing as the Togruta who is years older than the one he left behind him to go to Mandalore with Rex and their men, fights in front of him. Alone.

Alone because there are no Jedi in her time. Alone because instead of with Anakin guarding her back or fighting by her side he’s- he’s-

Anakin’s mind blanks, flinching away from finishing the thought, still struggling against accepting the vision in front of him. Accepting it would destroy him.

His awareness sharpens as the Sith Force pushes Ahsoka over the edge of some crevice and Anakin screams wordlessly, helpless to do anything but watch. But the perspective of the mirage changes and he sees Ahsoka laying dazed and semiconscious some distance below from where she’d fallen, she looks alright, clearly having managed to slow her descent just enough to cushion herself from real injury.

“Get up, Ahsoka,” he urges her despite knowing that she can’t hear him.

There’s a hoot that follows his own urging and he looks up noticing the convor that is sitting on the naked branch of one of the trees encircling the scene in front of him. There is something… familiar about it.

He remembers the sound of the wings that brought him here and tries to sense its nature. All he feels is a sense of pure Light coming from it and an intelligence that tells him almost as much.

“Why did you bring me here?” he rasps out, hatred swelling in his chest.

The convor just watches him.

Under him Ahsoka begins to stir with a pained gasp and Anakin’s fury at being shown something he doesn’t want to see is washed away by renewed worry.

“She’ll be fine,” he pleads though he doesn’t know from where he expects an answer, from the Force or the convor, or maybe himself, after all… “he won’t- I would never hurt her.”

Blind and deaf to those who are watching her, Ahsoka gets back on her feet with the stubborn glint in her eye which Anakin well knows, and leaps back toward the place from which she’d fallen.

In moments she’s running for the Sith’s turned back and jumping.

She slices for his masked face even as she’s slinging away from him and landing heavily on the ground, clearly more exhausted than her quick attack alone would have had Anakin believe.

_‘Ahsoka!’_ Yells the boy from before. _‘Come on, hurry!’_

_‘Ahsoka.’_ The voice of the Sith echoes but the mechanical sound of it is overridden by a human voice that freezes both Ahsoka and Anakin in place. The last vestiges of his denial drop away from him, the voice is his. The Sith turns his head and reveals the cut into his mask that exposes half his face. _‘Ahsoka.’_

_‘Anakin!’_ Ahsoka gasps out, voice pained and horrified. Then determination blooms on her face and Anakin’s heart drops in his stomach.

_‘I won’t leave you,’_ she announces standing up and facing him, _'not this time.’_

For a fraction of a moment Anakin thinks he sees a crack form and something almost human reflecting in the Sith yellow eye of his future self, he finds himself praying the Force for that something to survive and break free.

From behind Anakin there comes again a whisper from a different time: _‘I would never let anyone hurt you, Ahsoka… never…’_

But in front of Anakin comes something else.

_‘Then you will die,'_ the Sith says in direct contradiction to everything Anakin has ever promised both aloud and inside his own heart to the closest thing he’s ever had to a little sister or a daughter. And every single cell of his body rebels against a time where he would ever utter those words to Ahsoka. So even as the red lightsaber ignites in the Sith’s hands, Anakin rushes forward and through the fragile line of a portal separating his reality from theirs.

As the Sith’s lightsaber finishes the arch of its blow instead of encountering Ahsoka’s white dual sabers it’s stopped by the intervening block from a blue lightsaber in the hands of the Anakin Skywalker sixteen years out of his time.


	2. No Jedi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A confrontation, an escape and a conversation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope the second chapter doesn't disappoint all you very nice people who liked the first one, and you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it.

_‘Then you will die.’_ The words are still reverberating across Ahsoka’s mind, in the middle of shearing her heart in half, when everything changes abruptly.

The air between her and her fallen brother bends unnaturally and as it snaps in place there’s someone standing in that space. A blue lightsaber is thrust up and clashes against red a fractional distance apart from their face, their back is to Ahsoka but something about their build is so inherently familiar her breath catches in her throat. 

“No!” snarls Anakin. “You can’t be real.”

“Funny,” says the voice of another specter, the fuller version of the echo of a voice that had made her stagger moments ago, when she could no longer deny the truth of Darth Vader’s identity, “I was just thinking that too.”

The Force around Anakin- around Vader explodes with so much hatred it almost drowns out the background radiation of darkness from the Sith temple itself. When he fought her, Vader had been brutal and relentless - entirely focused - but what she could feel of him was largely apathy, it seemed she had been of no more significance to him than a speck of space-dust - except for that one fraction of a moment where she almost- _almost_ but not quite reached him and his exposed eye narrowed in hatred for her.

The minuscule time between one heartbeat and the next, as the information being broadcast is being processed by her brain but before that information sparks recognition, drags on into infinity. She sees the details, the lightsaber holding the Kyber crystal whose song is almost as familiar to her as the ones from her own sabers, the protective edge to the voice, the _voice_. She knows him, she knows him but-

Anakin?

She blinks and forcefully regains her equilibrium.

They are still battling in front of her and she sees at once how the Anakin wielding the red lightsaber seems to have lost all restraint, the leashed fury of his Vader persona gone in a blink and replaced by sanity frayed.

“You are nothing but a _shadow_ , I will purge you as I’ve purged all of you.” His voice is half Anakin and half vocal modulator, the impression savage and full of loathing. He slings his lightsaber in great arching sweeps that clash against the blue of his past, again and again, and _again,_ making the Anakin she would almost mistake for another hallucination - were it not for Vader’s reaction - take half a step back every time.

“Ahsoka!” screams Ezra, reminding her at last that she does not have time to freeze in place just because two versions of her old master are raging battle against each other.

She looks around, taking in the rapidly nearing disintegration of their surroundings and the descending wall threatening to cut them off from the only way out. Ezra and Kanan are already on the right side of it but by the look on Ezra’s face, she doesn’t think she can trust him to stay there.

“I don’t know,” the Anakin who looks as if pulled from some old memory of hers quips after a theatrical somersault over Vader’s shoulder, then he switches from Djem So to Soresu and moves back into place between Vader and her, “I think I’ll stay a while.”

It’s not his preferred form, Ahsoka remembers, but its use seems to infuriate Vader further.

For anyone else, this would be a mistake but for this other Anakin, it seems to work in his favor. Still, she doesn’t know how much longer he can last against the unabating zealotry of these attacks.

Ahsoka had just promised never to leave Anakin again, to herself she’d promised that she would find a way to help heal whatever had been broken for him to turn into who he is now, or to stop him here whatever the cost to Ahsoka herself. But the situation has clearly changed beyond her understanding and she has a feeling she no longer has the luxury to keep that promise. At least not to the Anakin she’d spoken it to.

Instead of letting herself think further, Ahsoka acts. Pushing back Ezra from crossing back to her, she runs for the lowering doorway, halting in place under it she tries to slow its descent, already tired from her own duel and ignoring the pain from what feels like a broken rib or two, she strains her Force abilities to their edge as she struggles against the tons of weight bearing down.

_‘Do, or do not, there is no try,’_ she remembers from her days as a Jedi initiate and holds the wall in _place_.

“Anakin!” she screams, hoping that from wherever he has come he’s still in good enough tune with her to understand her plan.

It seems he is, because at once he jumps away from his darker counterpart, simultaneously pushing him with the Force as minutes ago Vader had done to her.

In less than a moment, Vader reacts where she had not and stops his slide deeper into the collapsing temple. But the opening that fraction of a second creates is just enough for the Anakin not weighted down by the black suit of armor, and so still possessing the full range of his reflexes, to extract himself from his fight and join Ahsoka’s side as they both slide through the opening just as she lets go and the wall finishes its descent with a great boom.

Behind them, the tip of a red lightsaber cuts through the stone with a hiss.

“Come on!” she yells at Anakin as she runs to the Phantom where Ezra and the injured Kanan are waiting for her to join them before they take off.

She doesn’t look at Anakin but feels him following.

She feels _him_. Shining in the Force like a supergiant type star, which now that she’s thought it makes her swallow down a wet laugh. The star that burns brightest and dies young.

“Who’s our new friend?” Kanan asks suspiciously as soon as they’re close enough, his mask covering his face and protecting his injured eyes from the light.

Ahsoka can’t exactly blame him, not after their last ‘friend’ was Maul.

“Is that-” Ezra starts to ask but quiets from the look Ahsoka sends him.

“Keep an eye on him,” she says and rushes past him and Kanan both to jump into the pilot seat, powering up before she’s even fully in the chair. She hears all of them stumbling to stay on their feet behind her as she pulls sharply at the controls to ascend rapidly away from the temple. They stay just ahead of the first explosions and then leave them behind entirely as Ahsoka leaves the atmosphere and engages the coordinates for the jump into hyperspace.

Then she takes a moment to breathe. 

Lets herself feel the sheer _hurt_ of an Anakin genuinely intent on killing her. The same Anakin who had raised her and taught her and been her family from the moment he accepted her as his Padawan. The same Anakin who had saved her life countless times during the Clone Wars. The same Anakin who had promised never to let anyone hurt her.

Though she guesses he managed to keep that last promise. Somehow.

She wipes her hands over her face, trying to banish the exhaustion from the past few hours and ignores the slight wetness that as a result covers her fingers.

“I suppose that’s enough hiding for me then,” she mutters to herself and engaging autopilot reluctantly stands up to go face the unexpected guest whose eyes she can still feel on her. He’s been unusually quiet, the Anakin she remembers would have started talking as soon as they’d left the fight.

The Anakin who appeared out of thin air to stop Vader seems to be waiting on her.

And here is where Ahsoka gets her first proper look at this person who is too solid to be a ghost - not that this would make sense anyway, not with what she had just confirmed beyond doubt - but too impossible to be anything else. 

He does look like a memory pulled straight from her mind.

Not a day older than the last time she saw him, tired circles around his eyes and stress in the line of his shoulders. And a half-starved look of guilt and worry and affection on his face as he stares at her.

Why does that suddenly hurt worse than the hatred from Vader?

A step behind him Ezra’s eyes flicker back and forth between her and Anakin, full of barely suppressed curiosity. She supposes he’d have heard her call out to him when they made their escape, or maybe he just recognizes Anakin from the holographic recording he’d gotten some of his lightsaber lessons from. But she finds herself touched when instead of asking questions Ahsoka doesn’t yet have the answers to, he shuffles over to Kanan.

The ship isn’t big enough for real privacy but even the illusion of it is something she really needs for this conversation.

“Anakin.”

“Hello, Ahsoka,” he says, still standing by the ship door like he’s not certain if she wants him any closer. She doesn’t know either, she’s been missing him for more than a decade, since that last smile he ever sent her; longer even, since she placed her Padawan beads in his hands and walked away from the Jedi. She wants to run into his arms and feel that inherent safety she remembers came when she knew that he was looking out for her. But a version of him had just tried to kill her, had wrought countless atrocities across the galaxy since the rise of the Empire.

She clenches her hand around the padding of the pilot seat and stays where she is.

"How are you here?” she settles on. 

Finding out what had brought him here is more important than trying to sort out the scrambled, hurting heart of the younger Ahsoka within her.

“I’m… not sure exactly,” Anakin says with an abandoned motion of his arms. “There was a bird- a convor? And suddenly I was in this desert, there were voices, and they lead me to you and- and him.”

“Morai.” Ahsoka realizes, eyes staring in space, trying to consider what that would mean.

“What?”

She shakes her head, “Doesn’t matter.”

Her history with Morai is too involved and complicated to go into right now. And even though she knows he’s one of the very few people who wouldn’t first need the background on Mortis, she doesn’t think it’s all that relevant to this situation. But it’s good to know that what brought him here was Morai and not something connected to Malachor.

“Ahsoka?” Anakin says, hesitant and with a face that speaks of reluctance but also the need to know whatever question he’s about to ask. “When you said that there are no Jedi.”

Her hands cross over her chest and she stutters out a shaky breath, eyes clenching shut. Memory full of- no, she can’t let them get sidetracked before she’s gotten all the relevant answers first.

“Where were you? Before Morai brought you here?” She charges ahead, ignoring the imploring look on his face.

He doesn’t answer immediately, still clearly hoping she’d give him her answer first but after a moment he complies. “I had just left you to go with Rex to Mandalore and was heading to save the Chanc-”

“Three days,” Ahsoka breathes out, cold to her bones.

“What?”

“You’re from three days before the end of the Clone Wars,” she says out loud, though it’s more her own thought escaping the confines of her head because it’s too big to be contained there, than her trying to answer him.

“The war ends?” Anakin reacts like he’s been struck by lightning, and a joyous laugh escapes him, slightly mad with euphoria. “How?”

Abstractly she understands his sudden happiness, she remembers the Clone Wars, remembers how it all kept piling up until they were almost drowning in death. How by the end the constant fighting and loss of their men was wearing them all down to the bone. And that was before the bombing at the Jedi Temple; before she left, she doesn’t want to imagine how bad it had gotten later. Ahsoka remembers it all and still she feels his joy sear into her like a stab from a lightsaber. The Force around both her and Kanan and to a lesser degree even Ezra shudders from an old wound cut open.

Anakin flinches back.

“The Jedi were declared traitors to the Republic.” This time she lets the words out but doesn’t know how to say more. How do you inform someone of the genocide that only very very few of them survived?

“And were executed.” In the end, it is Kanan who helps her, his voice monotone. She’d almost forgotten that he and Ezra were listening too but she’s impossibly grateful to it suddenly. 

Anakin staggers back and leans against the sealed door of the Phantom for balance, pale-faced and horrified.

His Force presence blasts through the confines of the small ship the same way Vader’s did when he saw Anakin. He’s as different from Darth Vader as light is from darkness but to anyone who knows Anakin well they are also clearly the same man, he too exudes a boiling mass of chaos now. And though Anakin is full of love for those he cares for, the terror in it bends it almost beyond recognition. She had forgotten how frightening he could sometimes be. Or maybe she’d chosen to forget it when she‘d thought him dead and had instead remembered all the best parts of him.

It’s not as if there were few of them. He had been a good man, the best brother she could have asked for.

“Ahsoka?” Anakin pleads. “Where is Obi-Wan?”

She shudders again and feels her face pulling into a pained grimace, old grief crashing back into her being with a wave and exposing the wound that is as deep as the ones left by Anakin and by Padmé.

“I don’t know. I could never find him, I never found either of you. Not until…” she trails off unable to finish the words, not sure if she should say them in front of Kanan and Ezra anyway.

There’s no need to. By his face, she can tell that however much he saw before he appeared it was enough to learn the same thing Ahsoka did.

“What happened, Ahsoka?” His words come out almost silently.

She considers answering him. Telling him about the Clones. About Chancellor Palpatine being behind everything. About Order 66 and the inhibitor chips, the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Galactic Empire, the rebellion, and her work as Fulcrum.

But so much of it is a story that should not come from only her, and she’s not sure she should tell it in the fragile confines of a ship hurtling through hyperspace anyway. She well remembers Anakin’s temper.

And she’ll need someone else who knows Anakin just as well as she does before she can tell him about the death of Padmé Amidala.

“I think there’s someone you need to see first.”

It takes a few hours before they return to Atollon, it’s mostly spent in tired silence as they deal with their injuries. The worst of them are Kanan’s, if they had access to the best medical facilities available there would be hope but the Rebellion doesn’t have those resources and Ahsoka isn’t sure Kanan will ever regain his sight with what they’ll have access to. The best she’s able to do on hand is apply the bacta patches and wrap his eyes shut with a clean cloth. 

She deals with her own ribs after that, avoiding the temptation of further potentially dangerous conversation with Anakin by going back to the pilot seat and switching back to manual despite there not really being all that much for her to do.

When they finally arrive at Chopper Base she sees the rest of the Ghost crew and Rex right outside their viewport waiting for them to land.

She comes to a halt and sends Anakin a look of warning. “Wait in here until I can explain.”

Then she joins Kanan and Ezra as they lower the hatch and walk out, Hera immediately runs to Kanan but Ahsoka narrows in on Rex.

“I take it the mission was a success, Commander?” He says with a smile as soon as he sees her. 

“More or less.” Ahsoka doesn’t return it and reading something on her face Rex grows serious too. “Rex, someone unexpected showed up while we were on Malachor, I’ll tell you the details later but you’ll want to prepare yourself.“

The forehead above his graying eyebrows narrows in puzzlement but then his eyes slide over Ahsoka’s shoulder and shock hits his face.

"General?” he stutters.

“Hey, Rex. Ahsoka tells me I’ve missed some stuff,” Anakin says from behind her with a lightheartedness that she doesn’t need to see his face to know for a lie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Any comments would still be greatly appreciated. I really do run on them.


	3. Order 66

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One too many truths at once.

It’s the sight of Rex that finally hits him with the truth about how out of his own time he truly is.

Ahsoka is all grown up, of course, he saw that immediately. But any time he looks at her there’s a part of him that has never really stopped seeing the snippy fourteen-year-old who crashed into his world when she landed on Christophsis and informed him she was going to be his Padawan. That was true hours ago when he first greeted Ahsoka and Bo-Katan aboard Admiral Yularen’s Star-Destroyer, and it’s true now. He guesses that puts a little bit of a buffer between seeing that she’s almost taller than him now and actually internalizing it.

But there’s no space for that same denial when he looks at Rex.

The blond buzz cut of his second-in-command is replaced by a head bald with passed years, his face is covered in the thick hair of a white beard and there are lines of age under his eyes and on his forehead that weren’t there when he last saw him.

Rex looks _old_. 

He looks many decades older than him and yet Anakin knows that he’s younger than Ahsoka. Not for the first time he finds himself cursing the Kaminoans for their use of accelerated aging on the clones.

“General!” exclaims Rex again and rushes forward to grasp Anakin by his shoulders and _beam_ at him. The openness in Rex’s face startles him, it’s not that they haven’t grown closer and become more than General and his right-hand man in the three years they’ve fought together but he hadn’t thought this open affection to be in Rex’s nature. In seeing the aged Captain though he’d forgotten the ways in which this time seems to have changed beyond the superficial too because the reason for his happiness becomes clear as soon as he continues. “You’re alive, sir.”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that, Rex,” Anakin says uncomfortably, trying really hard not to think about the Sith that had attacked Ahsoka.

“Sir?”

“We should find somewhere more private to speak,” Ahsoka says. And then she turns toward the Twi'lek woman who is running her hands over the covered eyes of the man named Kanan, soft with painful care. “Hera, do you have somewhere we can use, it should be somewhere out of the way and… empty.”

The woman visibly breathes in and squares her shoulders.

Then she transforms from someone with an injured loved one into the clear leader she is, after a bit of organizing she orders the man to medical bay and the boy - Ezra - to follow the Lasat and the astromech droid back to the Ghost, - which through contextual clues he guesses is the name of their ship - so that he may give them a full rundown of everything that had happened. Finally, she turns to them, and following a brief pause of thought, she asks the very colorful Mandalorian to show them to one of the less used cargo holds. 

The Mandalorian - who quickly introduces herself as Sabine Wren - throws up a loose salute and with a wry grin tows them toward their destination.

“Glad you’re alive,” Sabine says to Ahsoka with grudging warmth as they walk, the two of them are a few steps ahead with Anakin and Rex behind them. Then she turns a sharply assessing look back toward Anakin. “And who’s the new guy?”

“I’m An-”

“-old friend,” Ahsoka chimes in.

The interruption is so smooth even Anakin barely catches that Ahsoka doesn’t want him to say his name. Though he’s not sure why when two other members of Sabine’s team already know it. But maybe she’s just trying to slow the flow of information.

Whatever’s the case, by the raise of eyebrows it seems Ahsoka didn’t fool Sabine either. But instead of needling further she just leads them to a door he’s guessing is their chosen destination.

‘‘Fulcrum,” she nods at Ahsoka with a dry tilt to her lips and leaves Anakin, Rex, and Ahsoka behind.

They enter the cargo hold without comment, it’s _mostly_ empty, just some random containers without anything in them.

Then there is an extended quiet as they all try to figure out how to start. It’s Rex who breaks it when neither Anakin nor Ahsoka seem able to find anything to say.

“Commander?” he prompts Ahsoka. “Eventful mission?”

“You could say that,” she says and rubs her eyes again. Anakin wonders how long she’s been awake, he’s seen her do that more than once since they ran from the Sith. “Maul was there. He tried to trick Ezra into helping him. He failed but he’s the one who hurt Kanan.”

So even after… however many years it’s been, Maul is still around causing pain and damage. Somehow in the face of everything else that is wrong with this time Anakin isn’t even surprised.

“And the General?” Rex asks.

“I’m getting to it, after that, Vader showed up and-”

“Are you okay, kid?” Rex grows worried at once and Anakin finds himself turning his face away at yet another clue about how serious of a threat he must be here. He really would have tried to murder Ahsoka. He knows the darkness he’s been trying to suppress and shed for years now, the anger he’s never been able to release into the Force as a good Jedi would, has been rising to the surface more and more lately, sometimes in ways that scare even him. But how could he ever fall so far that he would ever try to hurt _Snips?_

“Just bumps and bruises, Rex,” she assures him - lying through her teeth if the tight binding of her ribs was any indication, “nothing a few days won’t fix. Anyway, we- we fought, and then Anakin just appeared. He’s not from here exactly, he’s from before the end of the Clone Wars, Rex.”

“Ah, one of those Jedi things then,” Rex says seriously but without the gravitas of weight that should be there if he understood-

“Rex doesn’t know,” Anakin realizes.

“Know what?” Rex immediately zeroes in on Anakin with a look he’s well familiar with. It’s the face the clones, especially the commanding officers, make when they think one of their Jedi hasn’t shared all the information that will help them protect them. Anakin much prefers seeing it on Cody’s face.

It’s _funny_ when it’s on Cody’s face and it’s Obi-Wan who’s in trouble.

Here and now it’s not funny at all. He doesn’t want Rex to find out the kind of monster he seems to have become in this time.

Ahsoka is looking at him with a face that says she’ll keep it a secret if he wants but he knows he can’t really allow that. He doesn’t know how long he’s going to be stuck here for and once he’s gone Ahsoka might need backup. Rex can’t be that backup without knowing who he might face.

And he deserves to know.

“It was me,” he says past numb lips, “the Sith, the one you called Vader. He’s… me.”

Outwardly Rex doesn’t react much, at least not beyond looking into space past Anakin’s shoulder and clenching his hands into fists. But through the Force Anakin feels Rex stagger.

“I see,” Rex says a few moments later.

“He tried to kill her.” Anakin still can’t quite look at him. “I was watching from outside- outside time I guess? And I saw him threaten to kill her so I… stopped him.”

Then he falls silent, fighting the urge to apologize. What meaning would an ‘I’m sorry’ even carry here? It’d sound like nothing more than a meaningless platitude.

After a moment Ahsoka starts fidgeting with one of the sabers by her hip. She wants to ask him something she doesn’t think he’ll want to talk about.

“What is it Little One?” he says automatically, almost on instinct.

Ahsoka stares at him, eyes filling up with a great weight of emotions, flickering from pain, to wonder, to regret and grief. Then her jaw clenches stubbornly with some kind of decision and suddenly, before he has time to do more than pull apart his crossed arms, they are full of Ahsoka.

His heart _twists_ inside his chest and he brings his arms around her shoulders to pull her in closer. They weren’t really the hugging type when she was still his Padawan, it wasn’t the Jedi way, in fact, the only hug he remembers sharing with Ahsoka was after she died when the Daughter brought her back and she first opened her eyes.

This time feels different. For one, Ahsoka is actually hugging him _back_ \- the last time she’d been too dazed to move - but even apart from that this hug doesn’t feel the same, there’s less terror in it maybe. Or maybe it’s to do with how long it’s been since they’ve been around each other. He’s afraid that if he lets go she’ll pull back into herself and he’ll lose his little sister all over again.

“I missed you,” she whispers into his shoulder.

“Missed you too, Little One,” he says, this time entirely purposefully. He knows she’s talking about a length of time a lot longer than a few standard months but for him, they were very long and hard months and he’d missed her terribly.

They stay like that for half a standard minute more as Ahsoka seems to try to hide her tears in his tunic and he just closes his eyes to hold his own at bay.

“Anakin?” Ahsoka finally intones with reluctance. “Do you- do you think he survived?”

He stills and swallows, mind filling up with visions of the Sith Lord clad in black and Ahsoka being thrown over the crevice to fall to what might have been her death in that terrible place.

“Yes,” he says with little doubt and no pleasure at all. He knows himself too well, his own ship wouldn’t have been far and he’d already started to cut his way out when they’d left. He’s survived worse.

She lets go of a shuddering breath and finally pulls back, through the Force he gets a small glimpse of her walls lowering and is hit with an impression of guilty relief; like she doesn’t regret it as much as she thinks she should.

“Ahsoka?” he finally pulls up enough courage to ask again. “What _happened?_ ”

She hugs herself and takes a few steps back, exchanging an unenthused look with Rex which Anakin doesn’t know how to even begin to translate.

Rex coughs uncomfortably and seems to steel himself. Then he takes a moment to stare sharply at Anakin like he’s trying to guess Anakin’s reaction and isn’t all that hopeful about it.

Anakin has a bad feeling about this.

“General? You remember when Fives died after he followed Tup to Kamino and came back raving about the chips?” Rex says and Anakin narrows his forehead in puzzlement.

What could that possibly have to do with anything?

“Yes? It was as if he’d been driven insane,” he says, remembering that terrible week when absolutely everything seemed to go wrong. Tiplar dying for what felt like no reason at all, killed by one of Anakin’s own men. And Fives going AWOL only to show up barely coherent and raging nonsense against the Chancellor.

“He wasn’t insane, sir,” Rex whispers. “The chips inside us, inside all of us. They were there for a purpose.”

Anakin nods slowly, feeling like he’s ten steps behind. He takes a quick glance at Ahsoka, she has her hands wrapped tightly against her middle and a faraway look in her eyes like she’s trapped in her memory and seeing some unnamed horror.

And still, he doesn’t _understand_. Yes, the presence of those chips sometimes makes something uncomfortable graze against his conscience but they’re just there to-

“To inhibit the more violent instincts passed on by-” he tries repeating the explanation given to him by the Chancellor.

“That wasn’t their purpose, sir.” A hard, unforgiving glint enters Rex’s eyes. “They were there to take away our free will and make us follow every order given to us.”

“That’s not-”

“Good soldiers follow orders, _sir,_ ” Rex snaps and then lands a blow so blinding he doesn’t even comprehend it at first. “And when they were activated our orders were to execute all Jedi. We killed them, all of them.”

“No,” he gasps, throat dry and the world spinning, “the Chancellor would never allow-”

“The Chancellor is Darth Sidious, Anakin,” Ahsoka says and everything within him _implodes_.

They’re _lying_. They have to be lying. It can’t be the truth. Because if it’s true then it means absolutely nothing that Anakin believes in is real. It means the Chancellor would have been manipulating Anakin for _years_. It means the war that has been eating him alive has been nothing but a game. It means- it means he knows how his future self fell. But he still doesn’t know _why_. What could have possibly made him stupid, or blind, or _desperate_ enough to actually join the Sith?

A face flashes across his mind and all blood leaves his face as he trips forward toward Rex and Ahsoka.

“Where’s Padmé?” he gasps past his galloping heartbeat.

“Anakin,” Ahsoka says and then chokes back a sob.

“What happened to Padmé, Rex?” he tries again.

“I’m sorry, Anakin,” Ahsoka says and tries to take his hand. Anakin flings himself back sharply. The empty cargo containers around him explode, one after another as the Force around him pulls into a storm, violent hales of it battering from both within and outside him, destroying every available piece of matter surrounding him. There’s only just enough of his rational mind left to stop himself from harming Ahsoka and Rex but he doesn’t know how long it will last in the face of his wife’s apparent death.

“I’m sorry,” she says again from somewhere above him, - when had he fallen to his knees? - there’s a sharp blow to his head.

After that there is nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally the hug was gonna happen a bit later in the story but the opportunity presented itself and I decided that Ahsoka just wouldn't risk another 'later'.
> 
> Hope you all like the hug enough to stop you all from being too mad about the small cliffhanger ;)


	4. The Daughter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meditation, some answers and an ethical quandary of _epic_ proportions.

It’s the only thing she can think to do.

Anakin has always been one of the most powerful Force users Ahsoka’s ever known, she can’t overpower him, she can’t get past the storm of his grief to connect with him to calm him, and she doesn’t trust herself in the ability to talk him down.

But she also can’t let him continue to tear the place apart until he destroys something that can’t be replaced. So as he falls to his knees, arms around his stomach like he’s hiding a mortal injury, she only sees one way out.

She marches over to him in three quick steps.

“I’m sorry,” she says, pulling one of her sabers from her belt and without lighting it uses the hilt to knock him out with one sharp blow to the side of his head.

He drops like a defective TIE fighter.

The fury in the Force around them doesn’t so much vanish as peter out like waves receding and reluctantly returning to their natural stream of pathways connecting all living beings to one another. The feeling around Anakin himself is still dark and tumultuous but he’s stopped ripping apart the world around him in his grief, and that’s as good as she thinks she can expect for now.

“You know, there have been times I’ve wanted to do that,” Rex says, though there’s not as much humor in his voice as the words alone would have implied. Instead, he sounds tired, maybe a bit angry under it too, he’s always angry when the chips get brought up.

“I think that was something you had in common with Master Kenobi,” Ahsoka says ruefully, then she thinks about her other friend, the one whose fate had led her to do this “and probably Padmé too.”

They share a moment of not _quite_ amused silence.

Then Rex’s comlink chirps urgently, the sound soon followed by Hera’s voice, “Is everything okay there? Kanan said he felt something bad happening in the Force.”

“It’s under control, sir,” Rex assures her.

“Are you-”

“We’re fine, Hera,” Ahsoka says joining the conversation, “take care of Kanan.”

After a brief pause where Hera’s probably trying to decide if she wants to leave it alone or not, the comlink turns off and Ahsoka and Rex go back to staring at Anakin.

“So,” Rex says eventually, “Darth Vader.”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Rex,” she says but then can’t contain the words, “I think I already knew, I just couldn’t…”

“-believe,” Rex finishes for her.

“Yeah,” she says, eyes on the unconscious body of Anakin Skywalker, the Hero With No Fear, a general in the Grand Army of the Republic, Obi-Wan’s former Padawan, the man Padmé Amidala loved, the person who always believed in Ahsoka.

And the Jedi with unwavering loyalty in Chancellor Palpatine.

Why was he _here_? What was the Force trying to tell them? 

“What are we supposed to do?” she asks.

“Bring him to my quarters for now.” The answer comes from Rex instead of the Force but under the circumstances that’s likely just as well, she’s not sure she’s quite capable of dealing with the Force being any louder than it’s already gotten by quite literally pulling Anakin out of thin air - or at least letting Morai do so. “Someone should be there when he wakes up anyway. I’ll have first watch Commander, you should get some sleep.”

“I’m fi-” she starts and is interrupted in the middle by a long yawn that stretches the word out long past her intent, “-ine.”

“Sleep, sir. That’s an order,” Rex says patting her twice on the back, and then reaches down to heave Anakin’s arm over his shoulders. Ahsoka joins him from the other side and together they begin a probably slightly humorous-looking journey out of the cargo hold and towards the living quarters.

“I outrank you,” she says, if only because it’s the tradition by now.

“I was promoted and you left the army, sir,” Rex corrects her and stops to shift his hold over Anakin a bit.

“Well then I don’t have to take orders anyway, do I Rex?” she tries to smile but her badly bruised ribs, - by some rare luck not broken after all, - and the generally very long and eventful day makes her too tired to put any real effort in it.

“Do you want me to send for a holocall with Artoo, sir?” Rex asks innocently.

“…well played,” she says grudgingly, the match of the game going to Rex.

Rex grins.

Ahsoka tries to hide another yawn. He’s not wrong. What with the Inquisitors, Maul, Darth Vader, and Anakin Skywalker, this has turned out to be a very, _very_ long day. The headache she developed hours ago has even somehow managed to leave the confines of her brain and moved up to settle around her montrals too.

She really does need sleep. So once she helps drop Anakin on top of Rex’s mattress she doesn’t argue any further and half sleepwalks to her own temporarily assigned room. She’s unconscious before her head drops on the pillow.

Blessedly, she doesn’t dream at all.

When she wakes she wakes slowly, sluggishly, like she’s trying to swim to the surface of something with the consistency of sweetened Bantha milk. Though once Ahsoka manages it she almost regrets it, she doesn’t really feel all that much better rested at all. The headache is almost gone though and after checking the chrono, Ahsoka realizes it’s been a few hours.

She considers trying to go back to sleep but truthfully she’d rather see if Anakin is awake yet. And there’s a… tugging in the Force, barely perceptible but there. She’s meant to do something.

A few minutes and a sonic shower later she walks back to Rex’s room.

She’s allowed in as soon as she lets Rex know it’s her - it seems he’s taking this watch position seriously - and finds him seated in a chair on the other side of the room from the bed. Anakin is still laying where they dropped him.

“Any change?”

“No, Commander,” he says and twists his head from left to right, clearly trying to work out some kink in it. “You did a very good job with that knock to his head.”

“Hilarious, Rex,” she rolls her eyes.

“Thank you, sir.”

They spend a while glaring falsely at each other but then Anakin takes in a deeper breath and both their focus switches at once on him. For a moment it looks like he’ll wake but the moment passes and he remains as he is. She wonders if she really had hit him that hard, more likely though he’s just suffering from the same emotional exhaustion that had taken Ahsoka down those hours back.

“I guess it’s my turn now, you can borrow my room for a few hours until morning,” she suggests but isn’t all that surprised when Rex shakes his head.

“If it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d rather stay,” he says.

Ahsoka sighs.

“At least stop hurting your neck,” she advises and grabs a pillow from beside Anakin’s head to throw it at Rex’s.

It’s only after she’s watched him place that pillow behind his head and neck that she goes to Anakin’s side and tries to figure out that tugging.

“Why did you bring him to us, Morai?” she whispers, low enough that she doesn’t think Rex will hear her. “Am I supposed to help him or is he supposed to help us?”

With no answer deigning to present itself Ahsoka sits down on the floor, closes her eyes, and begins to meditate. When she was a Jedi, this was her least favorite part of that life, to sit still and open herself up to the Force, to quiet her simmering energy and mind, and _listen_. She wasn’t really all that good at it, then again neither was Anakin, so her lessons tended to lean much more heavily on combat. At the time she liked it that way.

But it’s been a long time since then and sometimes meditation is the only peace she gets. 

As soon as her mind quiets the tugging grows. She follows it, letting it carry her toward the presence of Anakin. He’s a picture of contradictions. The light in him quivering before the darkness, and placed almost on the edge of a blade between them is the sense of Anakin himself. There is no balance though, the only reason he’s not fallen already is that the two sides are pushing against each other with equal force, trapping him in the middle.

It is a frightening sight, to see how close Anakin is to the edge but it’s not what the Force wants to show her.

There is the sound of wings behind her and another presence joins hers.

“Hello, old friend,” she says and smiles at the sensation of Morai landing on her shoulder.

A feeling of warmth is the response she gets in return and then there is a question for permission. Ahsoka nods and slowly they begin to almost blend into one being, after all in a sense they are. They both hold what remains of the spirit of the Daughter, they are the same.

She looks at Anakin through Morai’s eyes and a new dimension joins what she had been able to see alone. The world around Anakin, it flickers from solid to smoke as Anakin flickers in opposition. As the world she knows solidifies, the Anakin that has jumped into her time loses substance, becomes a shadow of possibilities that never came to pass. And then he grows solid again and her own time turns into an echo of never-were(s).

There’s a choice hanging above Anakin, - though she can’t quite see what it is, - and whatever the choice he makes will mean either this Anakin becoming an echo that was never brought forward in time at all, or her timeline to be overgrown by one which Anakin’s choices will alter once he returns home.

“What did you do?” she asks of themselves, horror blooming within her.

She sees two branches under their talons, both steeped in places in darkness but carrying light in their leaves. But only one branch holds _balance_ and it is not the branch they’re on right now.

Tentatively she extends her hand, running their fingers over a leaf from the side of the might-yet-be(s).

_‘Aunt Ahsoka,’_ comes a girl’s whisper from within that leaf _‘you know I don’t want to be a Jedi like Luke does, why do I have to learn any of this stuff?’_

She snaps back into herself with a painful lurch. The pain comes from the separation, it is always so when Ahsoka and Morai do this, it’s why they’ve done it only a rare few times. The traces of the spirit the Daughter left behind in them remember being one being, one soul, and coming together in meditation as Ahsoka lets herself fall deeper into the Force to communicate with Morai allows those traces to touch. And so being pulled apart again feels like being torn in two.

But sometimes it is necessary.

_‘Aunt Ahsoka,’_ reverberates across her mind.

“That can’t matter,” she says to herself aloud, voice firm but hands shaking.

There’s a galaxy full of lives at stake. No one should have the power to erase and change them at will. But whether they should or shouldn’t doesn’t matter, it’s too late for that, Anakin is here. He’ll _have_ to make a choice, the Force demands it. And Ahsoka has just been granted the task of helping him make the right one.

But she doesn’t know which one that would even be.

If Anakin had come even a few years ago, it would be easier. The galaxy had had very little hope left back then, the rebellion was barely an insect to the Empire at the time. And yes, they’re not much more than that now either but she knows they’re the sort of insects that are even now combining into a swarm.

The rebel cells are coming together. The Empire is beginning to take notice. That hope which had been all but extinguished is beginning to sing in people’s hearts again.

But so many had died during Order 66 and millions had been killed or enslaved in its aftermath when the Emperor first started pulling new planets under the fold of his rule and they had still tried to resist before they were either occupied or ‘cleansed’.

Those lost are already dead of course, and ordinarily, that would mean needing to look to the future, to stop Palpatine from taking and ruining any more lives. To free the galaxy from his Sith rule.

But right now there is a chance for those dead to be saved. Maybe not all of them. But should she not _try_?

And if this timeline will really never reach true balance should she not fight to save the one that will?

She’s pulled from treading the quicksand of her thoughts further by Anakin’s fingers twitching and then going to rub at the bump on his head. She’s already getting back on her feet when Anakin groans and tries to sit up.

“What?” he asks, looking confused.

“I had to knock you out, you were panicking and it was beginning to look kinda ugly,” she says and feels Rex getting up behind her to come over too.

“Padmé!” he exclaims again and before he’s got the time to work himself up again - she can’t keep knocking him out every time just to stop his emotions from pulling him into darkness, - she tries something that wouldn’t have worked earlier when he was already deaf to anything except his own agony. She grabs his hand and tries to reach him through their neglected bond.

Something goes wrong. She means to offer him a safety rope so that he has a place to move toward but instead she’s pulled headlong into darkness.

He is a barely compressed mess of the fusion reaction of what feels like every emotion under the sun. But this is not new, it has always been Anakin’s nature to be so, to juggle love with righteous rage, and to be as kind to his friends as he could be cruel to his enemy. But now, when Ahsoka hurtles past that, what rules within Anakin is fear, fear of this future, fear of himself, fear that there is no difference between him and what he has turned into in her time. Fear over the woman he loves being dead. It’s here she finds the place where the Dark Side has tried to take root, not entirely without success.

He would do anything for Padmé.

This is twisted around another, older loss until they cannot be separated. There is an impression of warm hands, with skin rough from hard work, and a smile speaking of safety and kindness. Her eyes, full of loss as she beckons him to leave her behind, to be free as she remains in her chains. Her blood covering desert sand. And black rage.

Bodies, strewn around him in vengeance. And then Padmé keeping those burned pieces together.

Ahsoka didn’t mean to see so much, to go in so deeply but Anakin was a man drowning and it seems he’d pulled her under too.

For an eternity absent of time, she feels herself lose her footing and does the only thing she can. She screams.

_‘Anakin, stop!’_ she yells mentally and hopes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, see the thing about time travel fix-it fics is that it can go one of two ways and both of them have consequences. Either you do it by creating a 'new timeline' that won't affect the existing one, which doesn't always feel like a real fix-it because it doesn't REALLY fix anything, just makes it so that what happened 'here' doesn't happen 'there'. Or you overwrite the tragic timeline with a more hopeful one... which doesn't just erase the bad stuff.
> 
> And here I just think the second option works better for my story.
> 
> Have some faith though, I do have a plan and the Force can be stubborn (alright so it's a plan held together by tape and sticky notes but I do have one).
> 
> Oh, and also the next update might take a bit longer because I'm going to be swamped at work for the next two weeks and that's probably going to affect how much time and energy I have for writing. Thank you for reading, I hope you liked it.


	5. An Old Lesson

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The application of an overdue lesson and Anakin spending a bunch of time thinking about the person who gave him those lessons.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've edited this chapter to hell and back and have lost all ability to tell if it's any good anymore so I'm just gonna hope that it is and be done with it.
> 
> (I know that some of you might get tired of Anakin being an emotionally disastrous dumbass but it just cant be avoided, because if you haven't noticed Anakin is the emotional equivalent of Nitroglycerin AND a dumbass so...)

He doesn’t notice what he’s doing at first. So busy trying to grab a hold of something solid to use as an anchor, _anything_ to stop himself from slipping back into the place where all the fuel for his fear lays, that he doesn’t realize that what he’s grabbed is _Ahsoka_.

Not until the scream does he hear past the whirlwind of the Force battering against everything within him and figures out that he has just dragged Ahsoka’s mind inside his own head, dropped her in the most painful of his memories. The ones that rip him open every time he thinks back to them, except here, they’re probably hurting _her_.

Aware of her presence now, he tries to identify what memories he’d been bombarding her with, what- _his mother’s eyes, her blood, the blood he took from every single Tusken Raider there..._

Some new part of him breaks. She wasn’t supposed to see that, especially not that.

“No,” he gasps, almost sure the word actually pushes past his lips too and isn’t just something he thinks inside his spinning head.

He tries to reach her, to push her out and back into her own head but the storm around him just grows in size in response to his panic, and he loses his grip.

He needs to change his strategy. Helplessly he redoubles his efforts to take hold of the howling winds of his breaking heart and the terror, and as he grasps a small handful of it, for the first time in what feels like _years_ he tries to do more than just compress it into a hard diamond of sickly darkness and bury it somewhere deep inside himself.

_‘Don’t Jedi have emotions?’_ he had once asked Obi-Wan in the early days of his apprenticeship.

_‘We do,’_ his master had said with the patience that somehow never stopped being irritating.

_‘Then why don’t you ever get angry, or sad, or afraid?’_ he’d asked, desperate for an answer, because he was always all of that and also lonely, and he missed his mom and Qui-Gon Jinn, and Obi-Wan didn’t ever seem to _care_. And maybe that’s why Master Obi-Wan didn’t like him; because Anakin felt too much and a Jedi wasn’t supposed to.

_‘That’s not true, we are sentient beings, we feel as much as any other person in this galaxy. But as Jedi we have a duty to remain impartial when we need to, we couldn’t do that if we were unable to examine our feelings and release them into the Force,’_ had been Obi-Wan’s answer.

_‘Get rid of them, you mean,’_ he’d said resentfully.

_‘No, Anakin,’_ he’d disagreed, a bit of aggravation entering his voice that to Anakin had always felt a thousand times better than the cool patience, _‘releasing your feelings in the Force doesn’t ‘get rid of them’, it... purifies them. It doesn’t remove the thoughts that led to those emotions, and the emotions are still there, you just understand them better, can put them aside for the greater good.’_

_‘That’s stupid,’_ had been the only thing Anakin had been able to think to say back then.

_‘Yes, Anakin,’_ a small, amused smile had risen on Obi-Wan’s face, _‘it does sometimes feel that way.’_

Then he’d gone back to their lesson.

Now Anakin tries to actually use those lessons. He’s never been able to do it properly, not with any emotion that actually mattered. Not with the hatred, he feels for the people who killed his mother; not with the resentment that he’s grown to feel against Obi-Wan; not with the anger he holds against the entire Jedi Council for driving Ahsoka away.

But right now he needs to be able to do this, just this once. Because he _can’t_ hurt Ahsoka.

So he looks at the little part of the storm in front of him and _digs_ into it, trying to find the thing that’s powering it. _Padmé is dead._ He tries to hold that soul-shattering thought and instead feels it burn him from the inside out. No, too big, that’s too big to start with. _Chancellor Palpatine was pretending to be his friend._ There he finds anger, and the hurt it’s bound with, and he doesn’t want to believe it or accept it because of what it means for what he’s been fighting for. He _trusted_ him. And there is so little left he still trusts.

He’s lashing out because his denial can’t hold up against the facts. 

Like that Ahsoka wouldn’t lie.

_Chancellor Palpatine was pretending to be his friend,_ he thinks to himself once more but this time he tries to push that feeling of betrayal out into the Force. It’s like trying to expose something that has never known fresh air to the light. It shrinks into itself, trying to protect itself from something awful, except... it doesn’t hurt in the way he expects.

He takes in a deep breath and feels the relief of it hit some hidden spot inside him, like someone pouring clean water on a festering wound. First painful and then _good_.

The storm inside him loses a little substance, it’s not enough to calm him but it’s enough to function by. He wades into the chaos of himself and looks for Ahsoka.

_‘Ahsoka!’_ he calls out to her though it almost doesn’t matter because now that he’s stopped trying to hide within himself, and is facing the horrible barrage of his own emotions, finding Ahsoka is easy. He just looks for her bright and stubborn presence, and there she is. He guides her mind back toward the bond she must have tried to use to reach him and within a fraction of a moment, he’s alone in his head again.

He opens his eyes.

Ahsoka teeters on her feet, hands clutching her head with a pained grimace until Rex steadies her with a hand on her shoulder.

“You alright, Commander?” Rex asks.

“I’m fine, Rex. Just give me a minute,” Ahsoka says and sits down on the bed, a little unsteady still.

“Ahsoka,” he chokes out.

She smiles at him a small, pained smile and that hurts so much worse suddenly than the disgust he’d expected.

“Feeling better, Skyguy?” she asks _kindly_ , “You had me worried there for a bit.”

He tries to fight off a burst of hysterical laughter but finally gives up, though the sound that comes out is flat and somewhat hoarse as if he’s been screaming more than just in his head. Then laughter is choked off by a wave of despair that immobilizes him.

Padmé is dead. And by the grief that had poured out of Ahsoka when he asked after him, he guesses that so is Obi-Wan. Palpatine is a Sith Lord. The entire Clone Army has been forced to kill the Jedi. Did Cody kill Obi-Wan? Had some last free corner of Cody’s head been screaming as he pulled the trigger? Or was even that taken, leaving the clones as slaves even there? He tries to imagine every Trooper he’s ever served with being turned into something less even than the Seppie droids and-

No, he doesn’t have time for that, if he’s going to fix it - and if he manages to get back he’s _going_ to fix it, this future is too unbearable on every single front - then he needs to be able to function.

And he still needs Ahsoka to know that- he needs her to understand- he doesn’t ever want her to look at him the way she looked at that Sith version of him. She’s his little- she’s _Ahsoka_ , he can’t break her heart like that.

Weakly he tries to say, "I'm sorry for-"

"It's alright, no real harm done. And I suppose I should have been a bit more careful,” Ahsoka cuts him off with a cheerfulness that rings a bit false and stabs him in the chest.

Rex sighs loudly and pointedly in exasperation.

"You know, General, I really haven't missed this part of hanging around too many of you Force-sensitive people," Rex says, eyeing both of them, clearly confused about what Anakin and Ahsoka are talking about. 

"Sorry, Rex," Anakin says, something wedging into the back of his throat at Rex’s careful avoidance with using the word ‘Jedi’. He remembers how Ahsoka had shed herself of the title when she faced his Sith counterpart and how it had felt like a sort of rejection of all their lessons when she did it.

Rex just shakes his head. "So now that the General is... feeling better, what exactly is the plan here?" 

"I think... I think we need to go to Bail,” Ahsoka says thoughtfully with some hesitance.

"Senator Organa?" Anakin blinks, surprised. He knows the man a little through Padmé but hearing his name from Ahsoka is unexpected.

"Yes, he's one of the heads of the Rebellion. And I don't think we can do, whatever it is we have to do, alone,” she says and seems to grow more certain as she speaks.

"But how could he-" 

"If there are any Jedi survivors, he's probably the only one who would know." Her eyes fill up with strange certainty.

"I thought you said there were no-"

"I know, but a while back I thought I saw- it doesn't matter, even if he doesn't know of anyone, he should still know about you and I don't think it's safe to send it over Subspace. It's too big a risk. Better to find a ship that won't raise any eyebrows at showing up on Alderaan and tell him in person,” she says, clearly already making up plans about exactly where the best place would be to acquire this ship.

"Alright," Anakin says. 

Then she turns toward Rex.

"And Rex, maybe it's better if-" 

"Don't even think it about it, Commander. I let you make me stay behind when you went to Malachor, this I am definitely not going to be missing," Rex interrupts her. Anakin knows _that_ look on Rex’s face too, it’s the unyielding one that means that Rex isn’t going to be moved on this and that it’s in their best interests to _not_ try to give him an order that would lead to the need to disobey.

Somehow in a way that wouldn’t technically be disobeying a direct order at all.

"So I guess this will be just like old days, then," Ahsoka says, giving up as she and Anakin exchange a look.

Eyeing the two of them in deep suspicion Rex at once adds, "No one is allowed to push me off of anything, sir. I outrank _both_ of you now.”

"How do you figure that, Rex?" Anakin says with a hint of amusement that manages to move past the mountains of despair, though that agony is still just a corner or two behind the labyrinth of walls he’s been constructing through the process of this conversation.

"The Commander left, and you sir, seem to have gone evil. By process of elimination I'm in charge,” Rex says, startling a laugh out of Anakin.

Well, he can’t exactly argue against the logistics of that one.

They share a smile. He’s missed this, the three of them preparing to take on a new mission and throwing out occasionally morbid jokes to relieve the stress. But there’s more painful stuff to talk about and Ahsoka reminds him of that a moment later.

“Rex?” says Ahsoka.

“Yes, sir?”

“Can you give Anakin and me a moment?”

“Sure, Commander,” Rex says more seriously, “I’m sure both you and General are getting kind of hungry anyway. I’ll go look if there’s anything better than ration bars available.”

He leaves them behind to the hiss of the closing door... and the soundless echoes of a years-old massacre.

“About what you saw,” Anakin starts in the enclosed and suddenly oppressive air around them but falls quiet as no more words choose to come.

“You don’t have to explain, Anakin.”

“I think I do. When- when Obi-Wan’s master found me on Tatooine, me and my mother, we were...” he tries to say but chokes mid-sentence once more.

“Slaves,” Ahsoka says so quietly he almost misses it. Almost.

Anakin flinches.

“You knew?” he whispers.

“I... Master Kenobi told me before we went to Zygerria,” she says, not quite looking at him. Anakin is glad for it, he doesn’t think he’d be able to deal with the look in her eyes, whatever it turned out to be.

All at once, he’s uncertain if he’s angry at Obi-Wan for telling her or grateful. In any other circumstances it would be anger, but with Obi-Wan- with him dead...

Dead _._

The word rings hollow through him, crashing against both bitterness and despair. Because despite everything the man was like a father to him, in spite of how one-way that love and friendship so often felt when Obi-Wan was always such a _good_ Jedi. And Jedi of course did not permit themselves attachment. Which he’d so thoroughly proven by letting him think he was murdered and to then put on his _‘killer’s’ face_. Obi-Wan had shown how little he cared about Anakin that day, and Anakin can’t quite manage to forgive it.

He scrambles to gather the anger, to make it into a deflector shield, - at least anger doesn’t hurt - but it slips through like a low-velocity projectile when he again imagines Obi-Wan on the bridge of some ship, his back to Cody when...

-or maybe it hadn't happened like that at all, he'd seen himself try to kill Ahsoka after all, who knows what he'd done to his old master.

And anyway, it’s hard to bring up that anger for _this_ , not for telling Ahsoka something Anakin should have shared with her himself years ago.

With effort born of desperation he shoves it aside, he’ll deal with it when he’s back where he belongs. He’ll deal with it after he’s _saved him_ , and Padmé, and the clones. Instead, Anakin thinks again of his mother and the dreams that finally led him back to Tatooine, - that cursed hell of a place, - weeks too late.

“When I left with Qui-Gon to join the Jedi Order I had to leave her behind. And then, when I finally saw her again she was- she was dying and- they’d tortured her- they _murdered_ her so I-” he cuts himself off. He doesn’t have to say it, she _saw_.

She doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t know what that means but the silence is unbearable so he can’t stop himself from filling it.

“I know it wasn’t what a Jedi would have done. I know I should have-I should have stopped before- before- I should have stopped,” he says, and despite the undercurrent of horror he _still_ can’t quite make himself feel sorry. He’s never been able to regret it. Feel guilt for the worst of it? That came as soon as he’d regained his senses when everyone was dead but his mother was still gone. But regret? No, that has never come.

He _was_ a monster that day, he sees how the Chancellor could have made him one again.

The _Chancellor_ \- fury rises within him with a roar but he batters it down with the memory of Padmé’s face. It isn’t the time. That time will come but it can’t be now.

“Yes, you should have stopped,” Ahsoka finally says, though her voice doesn’t hold the judgment he expects. There is no forgiveness either however, just sadness.

“I was never a good Jedi, Ahsoka.” The great, big secret of the famous Chosen One.

“Maybe not but you were a good master, Anakin. You taught me everything I needed to survive in this galaxy, without you I would never have survived Order 66 or the years since then,” Ahsoka says and grasps his hand to squeeze it between her own, “so no matter how many wrong choices you’ve made, or were about to make, that will never not matter.”

He wants to believe that, he does.

It would be so easy to let those words become true. But in his memory, he replaces the sight of the dead Tusken Raiders with all the Jedi he’s ever known, or talked with, or passed in the hallways of the Temple, and Ahsoka’s words are nothing but a pretty illusion that tries to distance itself from the cold, hard truth.

He’s already a lot more like the Sith he met than he’d like to admit.

Because the truth is that with his wife’s life on the line there are only very few other lives he can’t see himself sacrificing to save hers. Everything else, even the fate of the galaxy is secondary. In fact, there might only be two people as important to Anakin as that. 

The only difference between him and his counterpart might be that Vader has _no one_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright so I'm hoping that I managed to show both why I think Anakin thinks that Obi-Wan doesn't care about him as much as he cares about Obi-Wan AND that he's clearly wrong.
> 
> Really though, tell me what you think of this chapter, I need to regain some faith in my own writing.


	6. The Goodbyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ahsoka reaches a deeper understanding of Darth Vader, and says goodbye to the Ghost Crew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Errrr... so IDK how many of you are still invested in this story after seven months but for those of you who are, I hope you enjoy this.

The door closes behind Ahsoka with a soft hiss, leaving Anakin and Rex on the other side of it, - Rex had come back bearing a few rations bars and one jogan fruit to split between them not long after Ahsoka and Anakin had fallen into an emotionally worn out silence. Eating together had been strange, the three of them sitting beside each other and talking about tomorrow’s plans in between bites.

It had let her almost pretend that the last sixteen years were nothing but a bad dream, that the galaxy was... under peril maybe, but not drenched in imperialism with countless planets enslaved and many of the rest starving under the heavy taxation and exploitation of any and all resources those planets had; like she was still part of the Jedi Order, spending a free evening with her family as they waited for news of their next mission.

She’d missed it _so much_.

But reality had eventually reasserted itself and she’d extracted herself from the company with a small lie about her headache - in truth, though it had returned briefly with her disastrous trip through Anakin’s mind it had also eased in the hour since then. It’s just- it hurt, having Anakin back when she knows how brief his return is likely to be.

So she’d left him and Rex to hopefully catch a few more hours of sleep before their trip to Alderaan in the morning.

She counts out ten slow, deep breaths, as the warm glow from the room leaves her senses and her shoulders drop, the feeling of getting her mind flayed raw returns brutally, the images she saw in Anakin’s mind beginning again to run over her closed eyelids in a horrifying loop.

But almost worse than the events themselves had been the feeling that spilled along with the memory. The pain that had drenched Anakin so deeply it had no longer been pain, as Ahsoka could understand it, but like a scream that builds to a pitch so high it cannot be heard, just felt in vibrations by auditory organs more acute than even her montrals.

Anakin hadn’t just hurt at his mother’s death, the grief had almost had substance, a taste even. And it had spilled out of Anakin and made everything and everyone at fault. Not even just the people who had killed her, not even just those that had been there as she’d died. The very planet he’d stood on had been guilty, the air he’d breathed and the sand beneath him, and the stars above him and all the planets that rotated them.

And Ahsoka can’t help taking that understanding and superimposing it over what she’d felt from Darth Vader in her near run-in with him; what she’d sensed during their confrontation.

It’s the same.

For the first time since she started to suspect that Vader was Anakin, she finds understanding in how her old master could have become what he is now. All that hatred burning so hot it almost turned around into something more akin to the frozen cold of vacuum. 

She doesn’t know the particulars. Doesn’t know how Padmé died, or how Master Kenobi died, or how Palpatine must have taken advantage of it to play the situation in his favor. She’ll probably never know. But she can imagine the Anakin on the other side of this door, - the one so close to the edge already - confronted with another loss but without the hope of going back and fixing it as is the case for this Anakin outside his time.

And the universe at fault for that loss. The Republic at fault for that loss. The- the Jedi Order at fault for that loss.

She clenches shut her eyes, trying to forget the screaming of the Force from sixteen years ago, as the lights of people she’d known all her life were extinguished one after another all across the galaxy.

Darth Vader isn’t Anakin stripped of all love and light, he’s Anakin who has burned it out of himself by his own hand, burned it until what is left is ashes and black coals and the dead remains of all that he once held most precious. But she doesn’t think it likely that he’d gotten _rid_ of it, any of it, letting go has never been in Anakin’s nature after all.

No, Ahsoka is now almost certain that Darth Vader holds the dead parts of himself as possessively close as he ever has. More so in fact. Like grotesque mementos now forever drenched in the burning hatred of the Dark Side.

And somehow- somehow that makes it feel so exponentially worse.

“Is something wrong?” comes the voice of Hera from behind her, startling Ahsoka out of her new revelation so badly she almost jumps in place. Only years of training and the control written into her very cells from her work as Fulcrum contains it to a slight twitch of her lekku.

“I’m fine,” Ahsoka lies with a tired smile and turns around to face her friend-in-arms. “I should be asking you that, I think. How’s Kanan?”

“As well as can be expected. With Imperial grade medical facilities we’d probably be able to save his sight but... Ezra’s with him now, I thought I should give them some time alone.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He’s alive,” Hera says as if at the end of the day that is the only thing that matters. And Ahsoka wishes that was true in her case too, or maybe she wishes that it _wouldn’t_ be. That when she had confronted Darth Vader and she’d cut open his mask, the first emotion she’d felt - before horror had followed, - had not been _joy,_ had not been _relief_.

“So,” Hera continues a moment later, her voice gaining a clear trace of sympathy, “Ezra says that was Anakin Skywalker, that he was your old-”

“My old Master,” Ahsoka confirms before Hera can. She doesn’t know why she doesn’t want to hear it aloud from someone else but the idea of it makes something shudder within her.

“Ezra also said he’d just dropped out of thin air during your escape from Malachor.” The sentence doesn’t end like a question but Ahsoka still feels it in Hera’s accompanying look.

A dozen scenarios run through Ahsoka’s mind as she tries to come up with the best tactical use for the information she has. That Anakin has traveled forward in time. That he might be going back, maybe erasing their entire reality by replacing it with a completely new one. Overwriting billions of lives, potentially including the lives of Hera’s entire crew. Maybe saving the galaxy from the clutches of the Empire before it gets a chance to rise at all. But Hera might never meet Kanan in the timeline that would replace theirs, or Ezra, or Sabine, or any of the family Ahsoka knows Hera loves as much as Ahsoka has ever loved her own.

Or he could just... fade out of reality, like once upon a time had happened to Ahsoka’s own twisted reflection on Mortis.

Ahsoka could tell the truth. Or she could lie. Or she could decide on a few different combinations of truth and lie that might be best for both Hera’s peace of mind and in leaving her well prepared for any potential threats that Anakin’s presence here brings them - and Ahsoka knows that it does carry danger for them, she remembers Darth Vader’s reaction to Anakin, he will be hunting them now, and if Vader has informed the Emperor...

In the end, she settles on the very essentials.

“He’s not from this time. Rex and I will be leaving tomorrow to bring him to someone higher in the Rebellion but I advise that Chopper Base puts scouts by the nearby hyperspace trails. Darth Vader... recognized Anakin, and if he’s not tracing the Phantom’s hyperspace trajectories already, he will be very shortly. I jumped in multiple directions before coming here and tracing them should be near impossible but..."

“But near impossible isn't something to rely on. I'll make sure it's done, we’ll be ready for evacuation at the first sign of trouble if the worst happens."

“Good.”

“You should get some rest, Ahsoka. You look almost as bad as Zeb first thing in the morning,” Hera says with a slightly forced grin, her worry for Ahsoka still clear in her eyes.

Ahsoka isn’t surprised by the observation, though she knows it’s more to do with emotional and not physical exhaustion. Still, she doesn’t want to draw Hera’s attention to it, and can’t really talk about it without admitting far too much, so she just lets out a tired yawn and nods a little. “Goodnight, Hera.”

“Goodnight. I’ll find you a ship for your trip off Home Base.”

\---

The next morning they’re ready to depart almost first thing.

All Ahsoka really owns is stuffed into a bag she’s got hanging around her shoulder, and even that is almost entirely filled with things she wouldn’t have much trouble replacing.

She’s always traveled light. When she’d been a Padawan it’d been because of her Jedi upbringing and because they never knew when they’d get assigned a new mission, or how fast they’d need to get there. And later she couldn’t afford to stay in one place for too long anyway. The threat of the Empire looming just over her shoulder, waiting for a slip-up; waiting for her to reveal herself as a Force user.

It’s not as if the Emperor was likely to have accepted her having left the Jedi Order as a reason to let her live. Not when she’d rather have spit in his face than join him.

Well... spit in his face and then done her very best to kill him where he stood, she corrects herself.

But her habit of traveling with only the bare essentials, - which in the very worst scenarios were just her two sabers - hadn’t changed even after she’d found Bail Organa and started working as Fulcrum. A spy doesn’t have the privilege of going back for her stuff when a safe house gets compromised after all; or the time to comb through her ship when she needs to switch it for one that’s not being tracked by the Empire.

“You sure you don’t need some backup?” Ezra says, staring at Ahsoka worriedly during the goodbyes. They’re all in the hangar bay, everyone except Kanan who hasn’t been released from medical yet, waiting for the rebel pilot that Hera had found, to finish doing some last quick flight checks. “Just in case... uhhh, any scary dark-siders show up?”

“We’ll be fine,” Ahsoka assures him and looks sideways to where Rex is making his own goodbyes to Zeb. Rex’s bag lays on the ground by his feet and his old helmet is pressed securely between his hand and his left side. Anakin is a step behind him, leaning a bit against the ship and eyes switching constantly between Rex and Ahsoka as if repeatedly checking that they’re still there, and alright, and still each in one piece.

Funny, when he’s the one Ahsoka and Rex had thought dead this past decade and a half. Or maybe less so when considering the news he’d gotten yesterday about Master Kenobi and Padmé.

Certainly prime setup for one overprotective Skyguy.

“Really? Because it kinda looked like your ‘old friend’ really pissed off Darth Vader,” Ezra’s voice turns pointed and eyes searching. There’s a question there that Ahsoka chooses to ignore. It doesn’t surprise her that despite some of what he’d heard on Malachor - and on Phantom during the trip back - it hadn’t been enough for Ezra to work out the truth himself. He doesn’t really have all the pieces and the puzzle doesn’t make a flimsiplast picture that would make sense to him.

The implication in Ezra’s not at all subtle hint about Darth Vader being after them, isn’t misplaced. 

But she can’t worry Ezra like that and she has absolutely zero wish to pull the Ghost Crew any further in Vader’s orbit than they have been already, so she chooses to assure him with a smile and a half-truth. “He doesn’t know where we’re going and with any luck, by the time he finds us it won’t matter.”

“ _We_ don’t even know where you’re going,” Ezra says leadingly.

“And you won’t,” Ahsoka grins back at his newest attempt to change her mind about keeping their planned destination secret, he’d been doing it since running into her an hour ago, which was presumably as soon as he’d heard about their imminent departure from Hera.

“Worth a shot,” Ezra shrugs and then loses his smile. “Good luck, Ahsoka.”

“And may the Force be with you, Ezra,” Ahsoka says and pulls the strap of her bag further up over her shoulder when she sees the pilot wave at them through the window of her small cargo hauler.

“You too,” Ezra says and after a moment of visible indecision lunges forward to hug her. 

She smiles at the gesture and hugs him back. There have been times when Ezra has proven himself wiser than his years but sometimes she’s reminded that he’s also just a kid, stuck in a war that should never rest on shoulders this young. Unfortunately, she can no more protect Ezra from this war than the Jedi Order could have protected their Padawans from the Clone Wars. Or what followed them.

Hera chooses that moment to join them, Ahsoka sees her over Ezra’s shoulder and greets her with a smile.

“If things get hairy, call us!” Hera says; it’s an order and Ahsoka receives it as such. Despite her inside joke with Rex and her rank as a Commander for the Rebellion, as a spy, the order of command gets a little vague. And as team leader to the crew that Ahsoka had temporarily joined, Hera’s technically above Ahsoka here, at least for as long as she’s working with their cell of the Rebellion.

“Always,” Ahsoka nods and when Ezra finally steps away, visibly trying to hide the threat of tears in his eyes, Ahsoka goes to receive a more formal hug from Hera too. “Say goodbye to Kanan for me.”

“I will,” Hera promises.

Finally, Ahsoka exchanges a smile with Sabine and Zeb, and patting Chopper in goodbye she joins Rex and Anakin on their way up the ramp of the ship.

They’re not going to be taken in it all the way to their destination, just be dropped off on one of the planets closer to the inner rim, one of the ones that are surviving their occupation a little better than others and still have public interplanetary transports to Alderaan.

Ahsoka, Rex, and Anakin had talked about it yesterday over their late-night dinner and had come to the conclusion that the quickest and easiest way to not get flagged by the Empire for suspicious travel logs, would be to come in on an Empire pre-approved ship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Okay, in my defense I had written the second part of the chapter as the _beginning_ of the chapter. But it didn't WORK so I realized that I needed something closer to the immediate aftermath of the end of the last chapter, which meant I didn't just need to write THAT but also that I needed to rewrite what I had _already_ written almost from scratch, because it didn't work with the new beginning anymore and... then I kinda got stuck).
> 
> Just... tell me what you think. This chapter kicked my ass and I'm hoping my fighting it back eventually kicked it in some kind of coherent - and interesting to read - shape.
> 
> And as a small apology for the long wait I'll give you a small (smaAAAAAAALLL) spoiler about next chapter: I'm switching to Rex's POV for a bit.


	7. Travel Down Memory Lane

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anakin wants some more answers and Rex is forced to remember the day he received the Order.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: for vague discussion of suicide (more info at the end of the chapter that include some small spoilers).

They are about seven standard hours into the first leg of the journey, and around halfway to the planet that should have something they can board that's heading to Alderaan - or at least in the right direction to it - when Rex’s old general seems to pick up the courage to ask him for more information about the last days of the Republic. 

The Commander is asleep in her seat on the left of the General. Even unconscious however she’s leaning in her old Master’s direction, like a young one seeking comfort from their parent. Except that the seats are just that little bit too far apart for her head to be able to rest against the General’s shoulder, instead just pressing against the padded wall behind her.

His chest aches for his vod’ika.

She probably hadn’t had as much sleep after she left them last night as she had promised them she would. Not that Rex blames her, he hadn’t been able to rest much himself, in fact, should probably have followed her example now and gotten what sleep he could before things were likely to turn as _interesting_ as they tended to any time General Skywalker was around.

If the General had been waiting for privacy, Rex doesn’t know why he didn’t just ask after the Commander had left for her own quarters before they even left Chopper Base. But he supposes that with the rebel pilot up in the cabin and well out of range of hearing, now is as good a time as any.

“Tell me what happened, Rex,” his general asks, voice soft as to not wake the Commander. “At least tell me everything you know.”

“That’s not really as much as you probably expect, General. We didn’t really have much time for anything other than running.”

“Please, Rex,” the General asks and with the pained look on his face reminds him that he’d been his friend too. Maybe as much his vod, as his clone brothers.

Rex sighs. Running hand over his face he forces himself to go back to that day. The day he lost his brothers; the day he’d had to kill troopers he’d have happily given his life for, to save the Commander.

“The Commander had captured Darth Maul, we were on our way back to rejoin you and the rest of the battalion on Coruscant when the order came through,” Rex starts out and then loses his voice.

Remembers the sensation that had slammed into him like a Venator-class Star Destroyer, the Order that had landed in his mind and left no room for anything else. No room for questions, or doubt, or arguments. Just the beskar solid certainty that the Jedi were traitors.

That good soldiers followed orders.

The only reason he’d managed to hold on for those precious few seconds which ended up saving the Commander’s life, was the fact that those words had another association for Rex to latch on to. He’d had the memory of Fives begging Rex to believe him.

It had been Fives that saved Ahsoka.

Without the suspicions that had been boiling under Rex’s surface for months, without that grief, without already having those traces of the truth floating around his head, he would never have understood what was happening those fractions of moments before his chip could take full control. Before it could steal from him the understanding of why his fingers on the triggers of the blasters - the ones he'd already been pointing at the Commander - were making sickness sear through the lining of his stomach like acid. 

“It was like a switch in our heads, sir,” Rex finally says past the stone in his throat and over the dying screams of the vode he’d shot echoing in his ears even now; past the picture of helmets in the snow imprinted on the back of his eyelids; over the memory of the look on his commander’s face when he’d first started blasting at her, each shot aimed to kill. “One moment I was me and the next... it was as if nothing mattered but following my orders, not the lives of my brothers, not that I would rather die than harm the Commander. And yet I was still me.”

He wishes that it hadn’t felt like it had still been him. That the control chips had had the mercy to make them into droids instead of leaving them with their identities but without the comprehension to understand that they would all rather swallow their own blasters than follow _those karking orders_ \- in fact as Rex well knows, when those chips started occasionally malfunctioning, later on, many had.

It had not been just Wolffe and Gregor he'd tried to save.

“I almost killed the Commander, sir,” Rex admits.

“No, you warned me, Rex,” apparently having been woken by the sound of their voices after all - the Commander objects, voice still rough from sleep but no less certain.

“Sir,-” he tries to argue.

“You saved me. You told me what I needed to know to understand what was going on. You lead me to the information about Fives’s death and the control chips in your heads,” the Commander says forcefully, staring at Rex with stubborn eyes.

Rex smiles tiredly and nods, knowing there’s no point in trying to keep arguing.

“ _Thank you_ , Rex,” the General says, the words weighted.

Rex looks at him and nods once more. His general’s eyes are full of meaning and an old unspoken vow kept. He hasn’t always agreed with his general about everything, especially during the last days of the Clone Wars when Rex had started to lose his trust in the Chancellor, while the General’s faith had been starting to take on a fanatic edge. But on this they had always been of one mind, since the very start on Christophsis when they had exchanged a silent promise that whatever else was to happen they would keep that snippy kid, with the heart the size of a Krayt dragon, safe.

“I- I let Maul go, I needed a distraction and I needed to get the chip out of Rex’s head,” the Commander says and Rex sees her swallow back the guilt he knows she still feels at that act, maybe even more so now that the Sith has hurt someone she cares about again. “Our ship crashed and everyone was dead, all the men that had come with me to Mandalore, even Jesse. We left behind my lightsabers and Rex’s helmet to make everyone think that we had died too and we ran.”

“And after?”

“We had to split up, General,” Rex chimes in, “a lone pair made up of a clone deserter and a Togruta? We were too conspicuous, too recognizable.”

“Eventually I put together some of the things that had happened,” the Commander says, haunted eyes staring into the distance. “The news of Emperor Palpatine started spreading. I found a holo recording of Master Kenobi getting passed around, he was warning the Jedi survivors to run. And before I had caught him Maul told me- he wanted my help to take down his old master, said that the Sith Lord hiding under everyone’s nose was about to win. And once the Empire started to take hold... it wasn’t hard to guess who he’d been talking about anymore.”

“And- and Padmé?”

Rex and the Commander exchange a careful look.

“I don’t know how it happened, Anakin,” she starts out slowly while Rex begins to closely watch his general for any new signs of needing a good knock to the head. “The official Empire line was that a Jedi had killed her.”

“The Emperor probably enjoyed coming up with that one,” Rex mutters scornfully under his breath.

For a moment his general’s face blanks and Rex feels his muscles tensing. But then the General visibly clenches his jaw and pushes himself out of whatever dark places his mind had apparently just spun into, pulling his back and shoulders into military straightness.

“She’s my wife,” the General says.

Rex and Ahsoka share a startled look, not at the confirmation about the _relationship,_ of course, everyone and their R2 unit had known that General Skywalker and Senator Amidala were absolutely, sickeningly together but-

“Oh,” Ahsoka says “I mean I knew that you loved her, we all knew that, but you were married?”

“Yeah, we were keeping it a secret until after the war. Not even Obi-Wan knew.”

Rex snorts, “Well, he definitely knew something.”

“What?” the General looks confused and the sheer gall of it after all the kriffing- really?!

“Really, General?” Rex gapes at him.

After the number of times he’d been on door duty while his general was taking a holo call with the Senator, and was forced to lie in General Kenobi’s face as the man stared at him with that damned raised eyebrow and that amused twist to his lips? Was the General really going to pretend that General Kenobi had been totally oblivious to the true goings-on of his former Padawan’s heart?

There hadn’t been a single member of the 501′th battalion that didn’t know. There had been _bets_ between his own men and the _212′th_ about when and how General Kenobi would manage to get General Skywalker to admit to his and the Senator’s relationship, which he and Cody had been willfully ignoring because the men had deserved all the innocent fun the war would let them have. And the General really thinks that General Kenobi hadn't-

Rex finds himself so speechless that all he can manage is to glare at his general and hope that the Force will take mercy on an old clone and slap the man in Rex’s name.

\---

The planet that the pilot leaves them all on is a small mid-rim trade planet. 

The Empire’s presence is visible but not overpowering, there’s a number of Stormtrooper patrols walking through the place but their weapons are holstered on their hips instead of in their arms, and the patrols are made up of only four troopers each.

The Rebellion must not have a cell here, Rex thinks

The people still step out of the Stormtrooper way with an air of visible caution though, eyes averted. Rex reads the kind of men these troopers are from those signs easily enough, but then a Rodian boy a little short of being called a teenager, trips while trying to remove himself from the path of one of the patrols, and a Stormtrooper almost absently kicks the kid out of his way.

The General halts mid-step beside him and Rex curses, knowing that what’s about to happen will complicate their mission tenfold. Luckily the Commander knows General Skywalker as well as Rex does and grabs his arm to tow him forward forcefully almost as soon as he’s stopped.

“No, Anakin,” she whispers under her breath, just loud enough for the General and Rex to hear “we don’t have the time and it _won’t help_. If he gets defended by three Rebels, he’ll end up getting grabbed for questioning, and believe me, that’s a lot worse than a few bruises that will fade inside a week.”

“He’s a _child._ Those men have no right to-” the General hisses under his breath.

“She’s right, sir. There’s nothing you can do without making it worse and if we try to interfere the Empire will send reinforcements, the number of Stormtroopers in the streets will grow and the next time a kid’s not fast enough at moving they will get a blaster shot to the face instead of a boot to the back.” Rex’s voice is grim, he knows the Empire guidebook well enough to know the pattern. “And we won’t be here anymore to help anyone.”

“If we had our men here-”

“Our men are dead, sir,” Rex interrupts him and grimaces at how harsh it comes out. But his general seems to be in need of a reality check, and if being reminded that this is not his time requires Rex to say some ugly truths, then that’s what he’s going to do.

“Rex-”

“Let’s focus on the mission, sir. Step one, find a ship that’s going to Alderaan.”

“Step two,” the Commander adds in “find a way to disguise you two well enough that you don’t get recognized the moment we step on the planet.”

“What?” the General asks, face puzzled, it’s a face that is still bringing up in Rex the irritation from hours ago about the incredible levels of what _must_ be deliberate obtuseness on his general’s part because no one could be _that dense_. But it makes him stop looking like he wants to pull out his lightsaber so Rex will call that a win.

“It’s been more than a decade so it’s not really that big a threat this far out from Coruscant but you were kinda famous, _Hero Without Fear,_ ” the Commander points out.

“And I’ve got a face that makes people swear they’ve seen me before,” Rex adds drily and then halts in his tracks as the answer strikes him. Letting out a heavy breath that goes down all the way to his diaphragm, Rex groans.

“What is it?” the Commander asks.

“I’ve got an idea, sir. And I think you’ll get to beat up those troopers, after all, General,” Rex says and feels his face pulling into a grimace.

“Then why do you look like Obi-Wan after someone’s stolen his morning ration of caf?” the General asks sounding suspicious. “And why do I not think I’ll like it much either?”

“Because those trooper uniforms are an insult to good armor. And none of the Stormtroopers were anywhere near as tall as you, sir. There’s stretch in the joints but it isn’t going to be comfortable.”

And he’d hoped so much after his trip to save Bridger with Jarrus, that he’d never have to put on a blasted Stormtrooper helmet again. The kriffing things were more fit for a junker heap than a self-respecting clone. He’d rather use them for target practice to train some Shinies than put one on his head.

He bets Cody would-

Abruptly he remembers where and when he is. It seems being in his old general’s presence again has been messing with his own sense of time too. Shaking his head, he reminds himself not to get lost in all that’s long gone and squares his shoulders.

“Well then, sirs, that armor isn’t going to steal itself.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning Details: Rex thinks about how all the Clone Troopers (him included) would have rather killed themselves than executed Order 66, and how later after some chips had started to malfunction many clones had done exactly that. It's no more detailed than that though.
> 
> \---
> 
> Anakin getting angry on behalf of a child... oh, the tragic irony.
> 
> Please let me know what you think, I was kinda really excited about writing from Rex's POV and it was really fun (but it's hard to guess if I actually did my favorite Clone Trooper as much justice as he deserves).


	8. The Stormtrooper Armor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The best team that has ever come out of the 501'th takes down some troopers. Anakin almost goes too far.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know, writing fight scenes is the worst, right? I think I need way more practice at them before they come out as interesting as I want them to but I don't think I did TOO much of a bad job.
> 
> Hope you enjoy it.

In the end, it’s rather simple.

They have been following the troopers through the market for less than a standard hour when they finally leave the crowded main streets of the market and head for what looks to be a shortcut between two wide, closely situated buildings. 

It seems the situational awareness of these Stormtroopers is almost as bad as that of a B1 battle droid. Anakin is utterly unimpressed, if they were from his battalion he’d have long since sent them to be ground into shape by- well, Rex actually.

Then again not a single man from the 501′th would have dared to kick a child out of their way for tripping. Anakin is going to enjoy this.

He exchanges a look with Rex and Ahsoka, each of whom is on a different side of the market and as one they abandon their feigned browsing of the wares being offered in the run-down stalls by the merchants and fasten their steps to catch up with the troopers.

Nearly as soon as they get out of view of the bustle of the market Ahsoka takes a running leap for the wall and using the momentum kicks against the stone to leap from one side of the narrow alley to the other. She’s up on the rooftop in two moves and then vanishing from Anakin’s view as she checks the situation on the other side of the shortcut.

He and Rex don’t have to wait long though, just a scant few moments later they see her head appear over the ledge again. She gestures the all-clear.

Seeing it Anakin follows her example and using just a touch of help from the Force leaps for the stone wall himself. Instead of joining Ahsoka up on the rooftop though, he continues forward to cut the patrol off from the exit and pen them in.

The most vulnerable point in a trap is just before it gets sprung, but as ever, Rex takes care of it for Anakin. Just a fraction of a moment before Anakin can drop in front of their targets there’s the sharp sound of a whistle that makes all four men swing around to face his Captain. It leaves them utterly blind to Anakin now being behind them.

As soon as his feet have touched cobbles Anakin grabs the first trooper by the arm and shoulder and using his weight against him spins him to smash face-first into the wall. It doesn’t quite knock the trooper out cold but while he’s still staggering Anakin takes advantage of the inattention and swings his body into a flying spin to land feet first, bearing all his weight, against the midriff of the second trooper.

They both meet the ground simultaneously but Anakin would bet his entire GAR salary - had he as a Jedi had any - that only one of them still feel it.

The seconds that the beginning of the attack has eaten up finally seem to have caught up with trooper number three because he’s rather belatedly reaching for his blaster when Ahsoka lands on his shoulders in a blur of motion from above. She executes a spin of her own that has the trooper smacking into the ground with his chin. If the man doesn’t have a broken jaw now Anakin will be shocked.

In the corner of his vision, Anakin sees that unlucky number four is having his own very short adventure with Rex.

Meanwhile, the first trooper seems to only be beginning to regain his bearings when Anakin narrows his eyes, grabs his foot, and _yanks_. There’s an ugly crack under his hands and Anakin smiles in satisfaction at the scream he hears through the helmet covering the trooper’s face. It’s that leg that had kicked the boy, Anakin had memorized the patrol position of that particular man just for this.

Still smiling he moves to take the helmet between his hands in preparation to-

“No, stop!” Ahsoka hisses at him.

Anakin looks over at her and finds troopers number two and three by her feet clearly knocked out. Number four is trying to uselessly wriggle out of Rex’s chokehold and fast on his way to joining his two unconscious friends.

“Why?” he asks, the anger at the man for his actions still bubbling within him “He deserves it.”

“Well the people who live here don’t deserve what will happen to them if there’s a dead Stormtrooper found in an alley,” she snaps back at him and Anakin flinches away from the look that accompanies her words. She’s looking at him with just a touch of that horror he’d seen on her face when she’d first recognized-

His hands recoil from the trooper like they’d gotten shocked by a stripped wire.

It’s exactly the kind of rookie mistake that might have gotten him killed but it seems the initial knock to the man’s head from when Anakin had first introduced his face to the wall, in combination with the pain from his freshly broken leg has knocked him out. Because as soon as Anakin’s arms have stopped holding him up he drops slack to the ground with the quiet clang of a cheap, plastoid composite helmet meeting pavement.

“Ahsoka,” he gets out past the painfully lodged boulder in his chest.

The look trickles away from her eyes like a receding wave, leaving a touch of regret on Ahsoka’s face and when she speaks again her voice has lost all sharpness. “It’s bad enough that we had to attack them to rob them, we can’t kill them too.”

“So what’s the plan then?” he asks just as carefully.

“I bought some spice from one of the less reputable merchants I walked past earlier, it’s not the heavy stuff, so they’ll be fine but-”

“Framing them, sir?” Rex asks, obviously jumping on Ahsoka’s idea.

“We drop them off in the bad part of the city a little high, maybe near a gambling den and if we’re lucky their commanding officers will think they got robbed and roughed up for being stupid or not settling their tabs,” Ahsoka shrugs, “the spice should deal with their short term memory so their arguments won't have that much weight. They might even try covering it up themselves.”

“Nice one, Commander,” Rex grins with visible pride.

Anakin’s lips twitch a bit too, it’s clever and likely to bring any heat that gets stirred up, down on the more criminal elements of the planet. The sort that probably know how to duck out of trouble better than the people just outside the alley. But he can’t stop thinking about that glimpse of horror in Ahsoka and whether she’d only hidden it now; whether it was still there and Ahsoka was just afraid to show it.

Snips couldn’t be _afraid_ of him.

“Ahsoka, I-” Anakin starts while finally getting back to his feet but loses his courage halfway through the words and drops his eyes back on the ground, on the unconscious Stormtroopers “me and Rex will get the armor while you’re dealing with the spice.” 

The guy he chooses to start with is number three, he’s the tallest of the bunch, though still significantly shorter than Anakin. Rex is probably right, it doesn’t look like it will be a very comfortable fit at all.

\---

Dealing with the troopers doesn't end up taking that long, they're back on track inside an hour and have found a ship heading for Alderaan that same day.

The only snag they almost hit is coming up with a genuine enough sounding reason, and convincing enough documentation, for two random troopers to be sent on an old cargo hauler that has been retrofitted for passenger trips, instead of by military transport.

Luckily, it seems this new Empire is a bit cheap making it not totally unheard of - which considering the shoddy quality of the troop armor he's currently squeezed into doesn't exactly come to Anakin as that big a surprise. The helmets alone don’t have any periphery vision coverage to speak of, and he’s not looking to get shot, but he’s pretty sure that blaster fire would cut through these things like a knife through butter.

Anyway, that problem gets solved too. Like all commerce-driven planets, there is a booming black market in the uglier underbelly of the system and Ahsoka finds them a set of forged Imperial orders without much trouble.

Those should satisfy anyone short of the very suspicious, or the very persistent. And do.

So here they are, hours into the last leg of the trip.

Anakin and Rex are by themselves in the back, with a wide gap between them and all the other passengers. Some had actually moved when he and Rex had sat down.

Ahsoka’s in the front. Apparently, the Empire is more than a bit xenophobic, and unless Ahsoka wanted to pretend to be their prisoner there weren’t many reasons for two Stormtroopers to travel in the company of a Togruta.

The more he learns, the more Anakin hates everything about this time, and every time he thinks he’s heard all the bad he could possibly hear he gets proved wrong.

He’s getting increasingly tired of being proved wrong.

He’s also getting increasingly tired of losing the feeling in his hands and feet as the lack of movement combines with the armor squeezing his joints. And he’s _certainly_ getting tired of-

“The Commander isn’t afraid of you, sir,” Rex interrupts Anakin mid-thought.

“What?”

He sees Rex turn his helmet-covered head toward Anakin and do that twist of the neck that always conveys Rex giving him an unimpressed stare. It doesn’t quite look right while Rex is wearing the wrong helmet and without the painted Jaig eyes he’s used to seeing.

“We both know that the Commander isn’t the sort to get frightened. She doesn’t hate you either,” Rex continues, and with his face safely hidden from view, Anakin doesn’t even try to control his pained grimace at the reminder of the thing he’s been trying to stop thinking about for hours now. “So whatever it is you’re brooding about you can stop, General.”

“She looked at me like-” he says almost under his breath but Rex just shakes his head and leans forward toward Anakin, probably in part to compensate for the fact that Anakin can’t see his glare.

He still feels it well enough though.

“She’s _worried_ about you, that’s not the same thing,” Rex says and sighs heavily like he thinks Anakin’s being an idiot, - with the sensation of a sharp sting Anakin misses Obi-Wan, he’d probably do that slow exhale too, then pinch the bridge of his nose like he had to fight off a headache and argue with him until Anakin felt better, - not to say that Anakin doesn’t agree with the assessment of being thought of as an idiot, especially in current circumstances and after learning that he’s spent more than half his life trusting a Sith Lord but-

“I almost killed-”

“You’ve killed in front of her before, _kriff it_ , she’s killed in front of you too,” Rex says.

“In battle, not-”

“It’s been a long time, General, and she’s a rebel spy now. It wasn’t that you almost killed that Bantha Poodoo that set her off, it’s what might come with the killing while you’re like this, sir,” Rex says, leaning back into his seat but not turning his head away, stare still heavy on Anakin even through the dark visor.

“Like what?” Anakin wets his lips and fights back a cold shiver.

Rex sighs again and then drops his hand over Anakin’s shoulder. “I won’t pretend I understand how Falling works for the Jedi but if you were one of my men instead of my General and we were still back in the time you’re from? I would have sent you to Kix for a psych eval already.”

Anakin barks out a short, sharp laugh that makes the closest of the passengers - the ones that are four seats away and seem to be pretending to be even further - flinch from the noise.

“Thanks,” he says drily.

“Just saying it as I see it,” Rex adds and then moves his hand away from his shoulder to knock his knuckles twice against the helmet Anakin’s wearing. “Don’t worry, sir, you’ll be able to take that thing off in an hour or two, it’s not long to Alderaan now.”

Anakin can’t quite pin it down but something about Rex’s words makes the Force shift to attention, there’s a feeling like a single pebble starting to roll downhill a mountain on the verge of an avalanche.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, PLEASE let me know what you thought. This is the most stressful fic I've ever attempted writing because fixing stuff involves so much PLOT and I don't usually do this much plotting in my fics.
> 
> And just, pls tell me if you liked it. It just really really brightens my day immeasurably.


	9. The Organas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ahsoka, Rex, and Anakin finally reach Alderaan and meet with Bail Organa.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I rewrote this chapter three times.
> 
> Oh, FYI, I kind of did some small edits on the previous chapters of this story. NOTHING that means you need to reread anything, it was just the grammar, words that I noticed a missing letter in, or stuff along those lines (and some places where past tenses had shown up). But I thought I should let you know.

When they finally land on Alderaan Ahsoka disembarks the ship while remaining separate from Anakin and Rex.

After all, the entire ruse rather falls apart if they get seen by the wrong set of eyes. Bail and Queen Breha might have managed to block most of the heavy Stormtrooper presence that the Empire would like to have on the planet, but that just means that in the place of troops the Emperor has sent many more spies.

And it gives Ahsoka a solid few hours alone, the beginning of which she uses to locate one of her drop-boxes and grab a secure comlink to send an encoded priority message to Bail so that he knows to get ready for company. For a moment she considers actually adding the purpose for her unexpected arrival on the planet but decides against it for the same reasons she didn’t transfer the information through HoloNet relays.

Even encoded the message could very well get flagged, and ‘Skywalker’ is not a name Ahsoka wants the Empire to be reminded of.

And there is always her role as Fulcrum to consider. 

If Vader _has_ informed the Emperor of what he’d experienced on Malachor, then the entire Imperial spy network is undoubtedly scouring every gigabyte of information through every known frequency for mention of Anakin’s name, or a glimpse of his face from all available surveillance droids. It is for that more than any other reason that Ahsoka needed Anakin to not come to Alderaan without a disguise.

If circumstances had been different she would have preferred not to bring Anakin here at all, and so not risk linking his presence in this time to one of the heads of the Rebel leadership.

But if there are any survivors of the purge of the Jedi Order other than Kanan, if her brief glimpse of Yoda was something other than a Force vision, Bail would be the one to keep those secrets. And she needs to get in contact with someone with a much deeper understanding of the Force than Ahsoka has herself.

Carrying a piece of the Daughter within her might have made her able to see more, even understand more than she could alone but it has never helped her manipulate the Force in ways that she will need to in order to help Anakin find his way back to the time he belongs in.

The reply comes shortly after she’s sent her own and contains directions for one of the hidden entrances into Aldera Royal Palace, as well as a set of security codes guarding those paths. That should help them avoid the palace staff.

She memorizes the map and codes and purges them from her comlink.

That done, Ahsoka leaves to join Anakin and Rex, which takes almost two whole standard hours more, after all, the shipyard isn't exactly near the middle of the city. 

But as she's getting closer there comes a strange pull through the lines in the Force.

It takes a while for Ahsoka to notice, it's too subtle at first. But the closer to the palace she gets the more she feels just a touch of something lightly magnetic against lines that are spiderweb thin. 

She finds them exactly where she expects to, - had given them the directions before splitting off from them almost twenty hours ago, - and yet as soon as she sees them in their stolen Stormtrooper uniforms something within Ahsoka eases, like a great weight dropping away. Seems that being around Anakin, the one whose loss she might have mourned most deeply of all has reminded her how quickly everything she cares about can vanish into smoke the moment she turns her back to it.

She’s not ready to let go again. Not yet. Not until she must.

“So?” Anakin asks as soon as he’s seen her.

“He’ll meet us in the palace as soon as we get there,” Ahsoka tells him.

“Lead the way, Commander,” Rex says gruffly “the sooner we get there the sooner the General and I can finally take off these Sith-forsaken helmets.”

“The helmets?” Anakin quips back with a tone of voice that isn’t that far from Rex’s “I don’t even care about the helmet anymore, I just want to feel my arms and legs again. This armor has been squeezing my limbs so much it feels like it’s even messing with the circuitry in my _artificial_ hand.”

Ahsoka rolls her eyes but finds herself fighting a smile.

Hearing Anakin squabbling with Rex makes her almost forget the fragile line her old Master is teetering on; the sense of righteousness that Anakin had been broadcasting as he’d been preparing to snap that trooper’s neck.

It was as if during that fight everything had been black, and white, and _simple_ for him. There had been only one thing the man deserved and Anakin had the right, the _duty_ , to see it done. It had been the closest to calm she’d sensed from Anakin since he’d shown up to stop the Sith whose reality was just as exactly, and _as terribly_ , simple as that too.

Ahsoka can’t let Anakin step any closer to the edge of that abyss.

If she’d learned anything through her confrontation with Darth Vader it’s that Ahsoka won’t be able to pull Anakin back toward the light if he falls.

So he can’t be allowed to Fall.

\---

Ahsoka leads them through the maze of narrow, empty passages that eventually lead to Bail’s personal work office. They're clearly old, though once in a while they get cut off by a door that asks for one of the codes Ahsoka had to memorize. Not for the first time she wonders if their existence speaks of a very interesting past for Alderaan, or just of some very disloyal Alderaani royal spouses.

The strands of Force she's been feeling since she started to move toward the palace are making themselves known with renewed gravity now that they're within its walls. It's not a bad feeling exactly - or warning of a threat - if anything Ahsoka would call it... eager.

She hesitates but then puts it at the back of her mind and knocks on the false wall guarding the last entrance, waiting to be let in.

“Ahsoka,” Bail smiles in welcome as soon as the wall rolls aside but then his eyes slide over her shoulder and his face turns serious, “I see you’ve brought friends. Are they the reason for the urgent message?”

“Yes,” Ahsoka says, “I-”

“Kriff it, sorry, sir,” Rex interrupts her and pulls off the helmet in a show of great relief “but I just couldn’t stand to keep that thing over my head a moment longer.”

"Ah, Captain Rex, I presume? I had heard of your survival, I was glad when-”

And it is then that another interruption comes, this time from the main door to the office. There comes a sound of a quick perfunctory knock and with it that feeling in the Force, now like the rapid pulling back of the tide right before a wave that goes from one side of the horizon until the other. Ahsoka nearly staggers in place under the roar of something massive as the door slides apart and gives way... to the presence of a girl with dark hair in braids, looped around her ears. Her face is down into a stack of flimsiplast documents, shuffling persistently through them, seeming to search for something.

“You forgot to give me the historic documents on the third Mon Calamari dynasty, Papa,” the girl says and finally turns her face up toward her father.

Ahsoka had been wrong, the Force hadn’t been roaring until that; exact; moment.

Rex seems to choke on his own breath, while Ahsoka feels her knees turn sluggish as she staggers and reaches behind her to steady herself against something more solid.

The girl has intelligent, brown eyes set in a sweet, oval face with a strong jaw that immediately conveys a contradiction in her character, it speaks at once of kindness and a rock-solid conviction that won't be told to move for anything. 

And she looks _just_ like her mother.

_‘Aunt Ahsoka...’_ echoes through her mind a slightly younger version of that same voice.

It’s then that she remembers that the thing her hand is clenching is not a wall. Though by the way that Anakin has suddenly frozen he might as well be.

Ahsoka and Rex exchange a single, panicked look.

“Now, isn’t the best time, Leia,” Bail’s voice is tight with controlled worry. He’s staring at Ahsoka and Rex, clearly having realized that they've recognized the secret he’s apparently been keeping for all of his daughter’s - his adoptive daughter’s - life. But he’s also just as clearly entirely in the dark about the most volatile element in the room.

Leia - her name is _Leia_ , and Ahsoka realizes she'd already known that. Bail and Breha having a daughter isn't exactly a secret, but now Ahsoka understands that there is a reason that she's never before _seen_ her.

Said daughter seems to finally take notice of the three guests in her father’s office and upon landing eyes on Rex and Anakin, both still in full Stormtrooper uniform and with only Rex with his face uncovered, her own turns stony and cold as ice. It seems she has no more love for the Empire than her father. And her protective fury is visible at once, though if Leia senses from Anakin what Ahsoka does right now, there is no sign of it.

In a blink of an eye, Ahsoka remembers the questions Bail had once asked her years back, nearly in the very beginning, about how to train a Force-sensitive child to stay hidden from other Force-users. For Leia to have grown up right under the nose of the Emperor, and yet to have remained undiscovered-

If she has cloaked herself well enough for that, she might not even sense the Force at all.

So maybe it's instinct, or maybe something else altogether, but eventually, Leia’s eyes abandon Rex entirely and focus on Anakin.

“Aren’t you a little _tall_ for a Stormtrooper?” she asks, pushing her nose up in the air a bit and portraying the kind of scoffing flippancy that it’s at once no longer Padmé that Ahsoka is being reminded of.

"Leia!" Bail exclaims in a tone of long-standing exasperation but then just lets his shoulders fall like he’s reminding himself that the battle there has already been lost many years - and the inevitable influence of DNA from someone who would sass with their last breath - back. Then he seems to pull together the nerves that had scattered all over the floor in the initial moments of his daughter's entrance, and walks over to Leia to place a hand on her shoulder. "I'm fine Leia, they're _old friends,_ " he says in obvious code, that by the very slight unwinding of Leia's shoulders, Ahsoka guesses means she knows about her father's work with the Rebellion. "I'll meet you after my meeting."

Somewhat reluctantly, still eyeing all three strangers in her father's office, Leia leaves the room.

As soon as the door clicks shut behind her and before Bail has had a chance to try to explain something that as far as Ahsoka’s concerned requires very little explanation - apart from maybe the reason for why he hadn't trusted her with the existence of someone who is essentially her niece - Ahsoka places herself between Anakin and Bail. Only somewhat more slowly Rex moves to step in front of the door Leia had just left by.

"Ahsoka?" Bail asks, now truly startled.

But Ahsoka doesn't have time to explain.

"Don’t," she says quietly as Anakin takes one unsteady step toward Bail.

And by some last miracle, Anakin listens. He staggers back to a stop and shakes his head like he's trying to throw off the mental cobwebs from a blow to the head. The eye of the storm which Ahsoka has been feeling like she'd gotten caught in, slows from a scream to something she can almost bear the touch of. And then he pulls up his hands and with almost mechanical movements he finally pulls off his own Stormtrooper helmet.

From behind Ahsoka, there comes the sound of Bail staggering back with an abrupt curse.

When she turns to look, Bail is staring at Anakin. But not like he's staring at a ghost. His eyes are blown wide and terrified and at once Ahsoka understands, he knows who Anakin becomes, and right now he thinks-

"It's not Vader, Bail. He's Anakin, he's not from this time. We came because I need to know if there are any survivors from Order 66 that I don't know about."

It seems she really should have risked sending this through the communicator after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BTW this was one of a number of scenes that I was most looking forward to writing when I first came up with the idea for this story.
> 
> Let me know how it came out.
> 
> Also, I've just noticed that Rex is doing all the cursing in this fic, but upon some thought I've decided that he's _earned it_.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm trying out a new thing to keep myself motivated to finish this story. I'm two chapters ahead in my writing and until I have written the chapter _after that_ I don't get to post. This will hopefully kick my butt into gear and also let me polish the chapters a bit better before I post them too.
> 
> Please let me know what you think though, believe me that will help a LOT too.


End file.
